I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned, tagged as racists, and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media. About how almost the entire scientific community discarded the idea as impossible. How during the early pandemic years, no mainstream news media dared talk about the possibility.
Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.
The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc.
In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
> The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc.
You hit the nail on the head.
> In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-up all by themselves.
Exactly. Even in India we were amazed by the cover-up. I am pretty sure every Asian country knew it was a cover-up. The very first reports on Coronavirus I came across was not even in the media. It was on a Korean Youtuber who posted regular video updates on the virus leak in China even before the news was picked up in the West. He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.
> He was warning how CCP was arresting scientists who put out information about the virus and even sharing videos of doctors who had recorded themselves warning about the virus itself (one of the first few who treated patients of the virus and fell sick themselves). I can't, for the life of me, find that channel on Youtube anymore. But yeah there was, and still is, a lot of censorship aided and abetted by Big Tech.
The death of the doctor was widely reported on throughout the pandemic[0][1][2].
I am talking about before the mainstream media took it seriously (few days before that video of the doctor became viral). If I could find the Korean Youtuber I would have linked it here. Can't remember the name. The other prolific one who was giving daily updates was "Koreana Jones". Was following these two Youtubers for updates.
I know, I live in Europe. But where I live in Europe we were simply following the pattern from the US; once the lab leak theory was linked to Trump, people supporting it were seen as Trump supporters.
Trump isn't very popular in Europe as you might know, so this was enough to make most people be quiet.
[Not] incidentally, around the world it's easy to find people who know more about American politics than their own local politics. I'm friends online with several Brazilians; they spend as much if not more time talking about Trump than Bolsonaro. Why is that?
I think this is for a few reasons; America is a [the?] global hegemon; so American domestic politics have some earnest global relevance. But more than that; reporting one country's news is more efficient than reporting N countries' news. Fewer stories means fewer writers to pay, less research and investigation to do, etc. Furthermore people have an appetite for news, but a finite appetite; sate people with news about America and you'll have them thinking less about local issues. Therefore, news organizations in other countries have both an economic and political incentive to report American news instead of local news. What's more, America encourages this because for America it is a form of soft power to live rent-free in the minds of everybody else.
Point is: when a narrative becomes taboo in American media, that's likely to rub off on the rest of the world. Particularly so in countries where a sizeable portion of the population consume at least some English-language media, participate on English-language forums, etc.
Chris Martenson did a lot of this as it was ongoing- of course his YouTube videos got flagged. As another commenter mentioned Dazik had a big role- he lead the delegation that went to China to investigate the origin even though he had an obvious conflict of interest. 60 minutes interviewed him without digging into the conflict of interest. There are now public emails between Fauci and others coordinating the NIH position that there was no lab leak. That silences much of the scientific community that doesn’t want problems with their grants. Not to mention Fauci constantly going on TV doing interviews to try to control the conversation.
I think Chris Martenson/Peak Prosperity goes too far on certain things (a little too-prepper/gold+silver) but I did find his videos for the first few months of COVID to be informative and well done especially when it came to the lab leak theory. His coverage of Hydroxychloroquine was well measured for the time it came out and I felt like he did an appropriate about-face once it was clear it didn't help.
> goose stepping along to lead the largest propaganda and brainwashing effort in our lifetimes.
It's crazy really. I wonder how many decades will have to go by before it becomes okay to acknowledge what a major fuckup the response to covid was. Currently, there is way too many people, at least on forums like this, that haven't woken up to how badly mislead they were.
Pure hysteria, politics and poorly interpreted data all bundled into one package. Shit was crazy.
It would be interesting to know the background of the infamous Lancet letter[1].
According to journalist Paul Thacker, the Lancet letter "helped to guide almost a year of reporting, as journalists helped to amplify Daszak’s message and to silence scientific and public debate." This affected reporting on the origins of the virus, "characterising the lab leak theory as unworthy of serious consideration".
At a high level, it's pretty simple. There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control.
These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US, and generally fed into the wet dream fantasies of western warlords looking for any excuse to enter that eternal war against Eastasia.
Any time that anything relating to information around Wuhan labs was released, there was a massive flood of how the "lab leak" theories were right all along, and China is, in fact, trying to kill us all. This is the sort of virulent hatred that no social media company wants to help propagate.
As a personal anecdote, living as an Asian in a US city with a population over 1M people, I definitely saw a change in peoples' stance towards Asians in general and Chinese in particular, and not in a good way. There was a lot more suspicion about Asians, their businesses, etc. It wasn't the same level of suspicion as during post-9/11 America but it had a similar vibe. A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both) Maybe that didn't result in violent crime, but it was not (and still isn't) a good time to be Chinese or display pride in one's Chinese heritage.
I hope one day we can look back at this period and think about how to better critically think about these things without applying personal biases and fears to a whole population.
Sorry you had to go through that. But I have to ask about this:
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
Did you have some extra context there? Or do you just assume that anyone criticizing the ccp is also criticizing chinese people? Because I feel like that's a reasonable stance towards any nation.
It seems like sometimes people aggressively read between the lines (probably because of real past experiences with shitty people), and it makes it so that reasonable people now can't express reasonable ideas and have other people understand what they're actually saying.
I especially notice this in online forums where some topics have been discussed in depth by a subset of the population. Through all that discussion, they've basically invented a whole field of study, and turned everyday phrases into jargon with unintuitive subtext.
Then someone new comes along, says something that seems completely innocuous, and the community jumps on them for the subtext that they're not even aware exists.
In what way did they claim to be criticizing the Chinese government but actually criticized Chinese culture? Because it is possible and valid to criticize the Chinese government and not the people. And it is also a possibility that your own personal biases could make it difficult to differentiate between the two. We have a surplus of Americans who take any criticism of America, the nation-state, as a personal insult, so I'm sure the same thing happens elsewhere.
>A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like, "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people."
This is a reasonable thing to say. I think mainland Chinese are oppressed by the Chinese Communist Party, and I hope I live to see the end of this cruel regime.
This may not be entirely fair but citizens of a country which is being shit to others feeling negative consequences due to their countries shitty actions is generally a good thing. It's up to Russians to fix their government and its up to Chinese to fix theirs - unless you are advocating for foreign invasion, which will probably make things a lot worse for you no matter where you currently live.
Add to that that there are many Russians publicly supporting the war and/or their government. The same goes for the Chinese and for corona specifically you had a lot of them travelling the world while the virus spread was heating up.
Ultimately, humans are pattern seeking animals and if you fit into a pattern of shitty people you better make sure that you make it clear you are not one of them. It would be better if people could be more discerning but I'd rather take this than not having any pushback for countries and other groups of people misbehaving.
This kinda just seems like an argument in favour of bigotry. I find it odd that you are so casual in your justification of it. This reminds me to always be mindful of the social norms of my current environment, because we could very easily be the oppressors/bigots/racists etc., and not even realize it until decades later...
Agreed, like the cold shoulder shown to white South Africans during Apartheid. Overall, it helped to change national sentiment and led to the end of Apartheid even though it might've harmed some people living abroad who were opposed to the system.
I don't think we've worked out a better way to deal with this yet, and it will always be a factor of the way populations are broadly responsible for their governments in democracies and even semi-democracies.
> A lot of dog whistling with sentiments like "I'm criticizing the Chinese government, not the Chinese people." (spoiler alert: it was both)
'Dog-whistling', meaning they don't overtly say it and you infer that they mean it. If they make it overt such that it doesn't need to be inferred, they're not longer dog whistling.
How do you know your inference is correct and that is their intent? How can you be sure that wasn't just an impression given to you by [social] media? The CCP has a vested interest in conflating any criticism of itself or the PRC generally with racist criticism of all Asians. They also say that criticism of their Uyghur genocide is dog whistling anti-Asian racism. The CCP say this of anything that criticizes them, and their narratives do not stop dead at their borders. I've heard it echoed by some of my coworkers, PRC nationals working in America, and even western media that might not endorse such narratives will still give voice to consideration of those narratives.
Now allow me to be frank; during the supposed surge of anti-Asian hatred ostensibly motivated by Trump and perpetrated by white nationalists, much of anti-Asian crimes that were being reported had been perpetrated by African Americans. It was probably crime motivated by class/social/economic inequality, and insofar as it disproportionately targeted Asian Americans at all (rather than selective reporting merely creating that appearance) it probably had nothing to do with any politician's covid rhetoric and was instead was an artifact of geographic proximity and inequality in policing (Asian American neighborhoods receive less protection from the police, making Asian Americans an easier target for crime.) In this last regard, you can easily show that racism against Asian Americans played a role, but such inequalities in policing are problems that go back many generations and have little if anything to do with covid.
I hope other readers will note that, in response to the above user’s account of sinophobia in the US, the comments here on HN have overwhelmingly attempted to invalidate those experiences. Responses have ranged from outright hostility to gaslighting behavior, even an attempt to deflect the discussion onto Black Americans despite the original comment mentioning no race other than Asian or Chinese.
The above commenter’s experiences will ring true for many Chinese living in the US, because we are the ones who experience and are impacted by sinophobia (this can also extend to other E/SEA diaspora to an extent). Whereas the commenters claiming that we’re biased or influenced by propaganda, as if they are uniquely exempt from such things, are not.
The comments rightly ask for clarification: did the user witness or experience discrimination or bias, or is the user equating criticisms of China with criticisms of individuals of Chinese descent. If the above user doesn't make that distinction, then it does invalidate the user's observations.
Criticisms of the Cuban government are absolutely independent of criticisms of individual Cubans like myself. If another Cuban person felt that they were being individually criticized when other people criticize Cuba, I'd tell them they need to learn to distinguish between the two - it's not the responsibility of the public to avoid any criticism of the Cuban government. This isn't an attempt to "deflect the discussion", it's using another country as an example to make it clear that this is a distinction we're perfectly capable of making for other ethnic group.
The point of using the term “sinophobia” rather than simply “prejudice” is that no, it does seem that some subset of people are uniquely unable to “criticize” PRC policy without injecting some trope about mainland Chinese people and culture. In fact, the point is to repeat the stereotype as if it were fact. The policy (whether it exists or not) is just an excuse.
For that matter, sincere requests for clarification are not immediately followed by attempts to dismiss the underlying concern as invalid. This inherently makes the request insincere.
If the criticism of the PRC were mixed in with Sinophobia, then doom2 should have expanded on that. As written, there's nothing to suggest that doom2 witnessed anything other than criticisms of the PRC. The idea that it's mixed in with stereotypes about mainland China would be a good example, but it's entirely your injection, not something stated in doom2's comment.
Remember, allegations of "dog-whistles" are really just saying "I'm assuming other people are implying XYZ." My conservative relatives think words like "diversity" or "inclusion" are dog-whistles for anti-white discrimination. They're earnest when they say the feel attacked, but that's entirely on account of their own assumptions and does not indicate any actual racism. If doom2 wants to make point, they should actually explain what they witnessed that was bigoted or hateful - don't just allege "dog-whistling" and do nothing to substantiate that claim.
Looks like there was a general increase in complaints as lockdowns eased. From the data, there were upticks in anti-jewish, anti-gay, anti-muslim and more. Asians still saw relatively more of an uptick than other motivations.
That could be an increase in reporting. After all you'd expect the uptick to happen in 2020-- it was COVID-19 after all.
Also worth to know that anti-asian hate was also a narrative pushed by the CPC to label things like supporting Hong Kong democracy protests or criticizing uighur genocide as "anti-asian hate", which happened after the CPC noticed the effectiveness of BLM protests in sowing us discord (mid-2020) so to trust any stats post 2020 it would at least need to segregate the two use cases.
I take it these are percentages of all complaints? Because the number of complaints for anti-Jewish hate crimes was 116 in 2020, but 198 in 2021, so a definite increase, but hate crime overall basically doubled as well, so the relative amount to the total is lower.
These are not the same thing and especially when comparing over time you need to take into account how the definitions for the categories themselves change.
Worth noting the west coast states with larger Asian populations were largely "locked down" in 2020. Schools didn't reopen until 2021. 2020 didn't have as many opportunities for individual interactions that could lead to such crimes.
How come those numbers could be used to support anti-ethical policies, to not say outright conspiracy, that prevented the elucidation of a pandemic that decimated millions?
> There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories around China and the WHO intentionally developing and deploying bio-weapons as a means of global population control.
I don’t recall a single instance of this. A year ago, people were saying on this site and elsewhere was that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “intentionally engineered”. A year before that, people argued that the issue was conflating “lab leak” with “leaked from WIV”, when WIV was established in that location due to the prevalence of novel coronaviruses in the region.
I saw the birth of r/WuhanFlu and other related subreddits that were created in early 2020, and accusations of it being a bioweapon were there from the start, and once someone looked up "Wuhan" on Google Maps and saw the virology institute, people were saying it was a lab leak.
You didn't see any 'Wuhan flu' bioengineering conspiracy theories about how china made covid on purpose to attack America? If not, you're either intentionally not seeing it or I want to use your media filter because it was literally everywhere.
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
The likes of Alina Chan and Richard Ebright are "easy mode" counterexamples for your statement.
I'll swing for the fences: Even Tom Cotton was -- at least once, I am exceedingly uninterested in combing through all his tweets and media appearances -- careful to distinguish between "lab leak" and "intentional act", despite being brazenly political and probably inspired by anti-China animus.
"Let me debunk the debunkers. @paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus:
1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market)
2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred)
3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach)
4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in)
Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it.
We ought to be transparent with the American people about all this. Maybe some of these so-called experts think they know better. I don’t. And they really don’t either."
Last time I checked our democracies are still running on the premise of informed voters. If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
> If discussion of hypothesis needs to be suppressed during a 3-year-long "emergency" then we have an issue.
Unfortunately, we do have an issue. Ignoring that it is one will not solve it, nor will brushing it under the rug by the lame attempts at disinformation removal. We need to face the fact that a decent amount of our population is acting out of anger and fear, often irrationally and without evidence, and that they were used and manipulated for political and monetary gain and it has gotten passed the point where it can be walked back.
Social media is a vector but not the cause. I don't know what the answer is, but we certainly do have an issue.
I’d love “informed voters” though from what I see of social media, it does anything but inform through its creation of cliques and upvoting based on popularity, not veracity or even reasoned argument.
One example is the switch to paid blue checkmarks on Twitter. Prior to the switch, there’d be some semblance (not great) of debate on comments. Now, all the musk fans and RW-oriented subscribers completely dominate so all you see in response to a Dem or “RINO” tweet is reflexive comments calling the OP lies, incorrect whataboutism, conspiracy theory of the day, etc, with more reasoned fact checking buried way down.
This is particularly pronounced with any tweet about the Trump indictment with little discussion of the substance of the indictment. The crackpot hypothesis/meme of Paul Pelosi’s attack being a gay love spat is another example. The participants didn’t even want to read the police report before moving on to another conspiracy theory about the report’s generation. Reasoned discussion would be great. It’s just not happening.
That's probably because for the years prior the same people were bashed into the ground for their beliefs. Now that it turns out it's more true than not, they're probably mad.
i think you’d find that in just about every significant crisis of any significant timeframe plenty of examples of clamping down on witch-hunts in these very democracies.
am i advocating for this? of course not, however, we have countless examples where conspiracies and just plain paranoid thinking spun out and resulted in very very real atrocities. significant atrocities that were much more real and much more severe than “oh woe is me, i was muted on a social media site.”
again, i’m not advocating for this, but any conversational talking point surrounding this topic which ignores those issues is not a serious one.
"In the first four months of the pandemic, there were 145 reports to the NYC Commission on Human
Rights of coronavirus-related Anti-Asian hate incidents. That’s 12x the year before."
"⅓ of Americans report they have witnessed blame on Asians for the outbreak"
I'm sorry, is saying that Covid originated from China a conspiracy theory? Or do you maybe believe that this was caused by Trump calling it 'China flu' a few times? Now, that's a conspiracy theory.
Violence (including mass shootings and church burnings) inspired by replacement theory and incelism.
Anti-vax beliefs led to more deaths due to COVID, and greater economic and systemic stress than otherwise would have occurred had a significant number of people afraid of adrenochrome harvesting and the New World Order not purposely undermined pandemic control efforts.
Currently the "groomer" conspiracy theories seem to be headed towards some mass cultural violence event towards trangender people, with politicians openly calling for the "elimination" of transgerism, but that remains to be seen.
But let's ask what atrocities have ever been prevented by conspiracy theories? None. QAnon has been more of a hindrance to efforts to combat child abuse and human trafficking than a benefit, and they were entirely focused on "decoding" the Podesta emails and "exposing" satanic rituals in the Democratic Party while Epstein was going about his business.
It should go without saying that none of the doomsday scenarios the COVID conspiracy theorists predicted came to pass. All they accomplished was making the pandemic worse. And no doubt the seeds of paranoia and mistrust they laid will make the next pandemic worse as well.
Hell, even MKUltra wasn't uncovered by conspiracy theorists - it was exposed by accident through an unrelated FOIA leak. NSA spying? The Simpsons did a bit about that before Snowden, but conspiracy theorists were going on about mind-control rays being beamed through televisions and mass hypnosis.
These people want the world to believe they are the the ones constantly telling truth to power, the only ones who can see the dark truths hidden behind the curtain, and they'll insist they are always right. But at best they only coincidentally appear to be right, in the same way as a stopped clock, and always in a way that does more harm than good.
The canonical example is January 6th, in which a bunch of unarmed QAnon conspiracy theorists, along with embedded agent provocateurs from the FBI, committed the following atrocities:
1. Larped as a Viking
2. Stole a podium
3. Placed feet on a desk
4. Broke a window
5. Caused a woman, who was not in the same building, to cry
There were several other terrible acts committed by these evil people, but these were the most commonly cited ones. Sicknick's death was widely publicized at first, but then magically got blackholed later when it turned out that a group of QAnon-influenced platelets formed a blood clot that killed the poor patriot.
Fortunately for us, these evil insurrectionists were denied their due process rights for years, and our hallowed and beloved Congress members spent a full month of their valuable time on hearings to get to the bottom of this genocide.
> It's trivial to find people inside your echo-chamber being well-behaved --- this doesn't answer what a platform's moral responsibility is to society.
I am not a Republican, Tom Cotton is incredibly far away from anything which could be considered my "echo chamber", and I never claimed he was well-behaved.
I chose him specifically to make the specific and narrow point that even brazenly political actors were careful to explicitly distinguish between accidental/unintentional release and an intentional release; and also made clear that "intentional release" was the possibility they regarded as least likely. This was in response to the comment I replied to, whose author said "I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china".
I think most people -- political leaders and otherwise -- are perfectly capable of distinguishing between "high-risk research goes tragically wrong" and "a bioweapon was released on purpose".
If anything, these hamhanded efforts (equating a prosaic "people and/or equipment messed up" scenario to "intentional release of bioweapon", making spurious accusations of racism, claiming that the case for a natural origin is ironclad, government agencies refusing to hand over relevant documents to Senators with the right to see them, etc) to censor discussion and impede investigation of the former has fueled incredibly noxious conspiratorial thinking.
Strange, I have the exact opposite experience. I have personally have felt ostracized multiple times for suggesting it was likely there was an unintentional lab leak. I often got criticized for suggesting it was a bio-weapon, while I never thought that and never even said those words. Sometime in the past 12 months this disappeared.
What "weather balloon incident"? China intentionally sent a spy balloon into US airspace to gather intelligence and test our response. You can't seriously expect us to believe that it was for weather observations.
Yes, true. Based on what we're told about it, it does sound like a legit spy balloon.
What gives me pause is that our collective national security apparatus saw fit to let it traverse the entire fucking country before doing anything about it. And in the end, America even acknowledged that it was blown off course-- which is what the Chinese were saying from the start.
I don't trust the Chinese-- at all. I don't trust America either though. I remember the certainty with which they said there was evidence of WMDs in Iraq.
In Canada, China "interfering with our democracy" is all the latest rage... At one point about a month ago, 11 out of the top 20 posts on /r/Canada had some negative reference to China (most being related to the democracy interference story, but a few others I can't remember the topic of).
What I don't get is that people automatically equate a lab leak in China with a lab leak by China. It's uncontroversial that American funding was involved. The most likely intentional scenario would be a leak caused by the United States to harm the Chinese economy. If it hadn't spread beyond China's borders, the epidemic would have been a massive win for the US.
What's not to get? Trump, Fox news, and a vanguard of the Republican party framed Coronavirus as a Chinese attack on the world in an attempt to boost their support.
Why some people are willing to believe the nonsense spouted by both I don't understand, but the fact that people do explains why so many view it as an intentional act by China.
That is nonsense. Even highly qualified people like Alina Chan were pushed in the conspiracy camp during the first year - just for saying that the lab leak is one (of many) possible sources of the virus.
I think this says more about you than others. "every single instance" is a gross exaggeration. This is your personal bias at play so that when you read "lab leak", you perceive "racist conspiracy theory"
In this post and the one it is replying to, we see an example of how dichotomization gets in the way of discussing complex issues, and anecdotal dichotomization doubly so.
> I never met anyone who didn't equate "lab leak" with an intentional act by china
You must have a very conspiratorial group of friends / contacts !
I followed the whole covid story pretty closely, and as I recall "lab leak" was taken by almost everyone as "accidental lab leak". Was the lab perhaps doing some type of "gain of function" research that they were not meant to be doing? TBD, but the massive (as it turns out) initial over-reaction to covid in China certainly doesn't look like something they intended to inflict on themselves (as well as eventually the rest of the world).
Hi me! And a veritable ton of Hacker News folks back then. I have plenty of misgivings about China but I am also a reasonable person. Turning this into an everybody weaponized it against Asians argument is handing a lot of us a weapon we never picked up.
bizarre. it's even in the name, "leak". very weird to pretend there weren't a lot of people who thought a lab worker contracted it and passed it to the food market
I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons.
In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. Since this risks creating another pandemic, suppressing the story because of concerns about street crime is very misguided.
> the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN.
This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic.
You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
You can explain how it is done: lots of computational simulations, and some benchtop with results feeding back into computational methods.
You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
And then someone will stand up on a chair and yell “SUPER VIRUS!”
Anyway from my perspective, the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either (1) blame China for an “act of god/nature” or (2) argue for a moratorium on infectious disease / vaccine / therapeutic research.
Please note that no one here is calling you a racist. But I think calling parts of your comment uninformed or misinformed is fair game for discussion.
> the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either
For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.
It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000? And how many of those are within driving distance of the one lab where:
- They study novel coronaviruses
- They sampled the same regions where the closest relatives to the virus were found
- They applied to put a furin cleavage site in a coronavirus before the pandemic
- They were cited in diplomatic cables for poor safety standards
- The database containing records of the viral sequences was taken down right before the pandemic
- A scientist working at the lab at the time of the origin disappeared
- A scientist who patented a coronavirus vaccine a few months into the pandemic "jumped off the roof"?
Does a lab accident not immediately jump out as the obvious leading possibility to you?
>It's so obvious that an appeal to common sense is all that's necessary. How many markets do you think are in China? 100,000? 1,000,000?
This is why "common sense" is very often wrong and we have to refer to data instead. You're making assumptions that are very wrong.
The wet market was over 50,000 square metres in size and one of the largest in China. The idea that there are hundreds or millions of these things is completely backwards.
The conditions were unsanitary, animals were slaughtered on site, and large numbers of wild animals were sold.
This is exactly the sort of place you'd expect a zoonotic spillover event to occur. It was flagged beforehand as a danger site.
It's not impossible that it could have been a lab leak, but consider that this market had hundreds of thousands of animals being kept, slaughtered and sold, in unsanitary conditions, shitting and pissing on each other, bleeding everywhere and biting humans and each other.
Now compare that to a secure biolab holding a small number of samples whilst following biosecure protocols. Even if they weren't perfect, which environment provides the best chance of a spillover event?
Well, according to a quick search there are 40k wet markets in China. How big do you think the average wet market is? Even guessing 1000 square meters, which is very conservative, the wuhan wet market only represents about 0.1% of wet market square footage in China. By this back of the envelope math, the chance that a zoonotic spillover at a wet market would occur so close to the lab is less than 0.1%.
And sure, the wuhan market is a great place for a zoonotic spillover to occur, but any wet market would be, so the wuhan market in particular isn't the exact place you would expect. In fact I would expect it to occur at a market much closer to where the most similar viruses were found.
However, since the wuhan market is the enormous unsanitary market near the novel coronavirus lab, it is the exact place I would expect the first super spreader event to occur following a leak at that lab.
'Common sense' says that the thing which has occurred periodically throughout human history (plagues and epidemics) completely naturally and is occurring around the same period after the last one ('Spanish' flu of 1918-20) would have the same causes as those before it, but with accelerated time frames due to ease of travel and population density.
There have been more cases of 'almost epidemic but for action by health officials' with SARS and avian flu etc which makes it 'common sense' that these things occur pretty frequently and would be happening more often naturally if not for luck and structures in place to mitigate them. Those structures also happened to be dissolved by the US leaders in charge at the time, which seems to fit the puzzle.
So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.
So tell me, looking at history, of all outbreaks that have occurred within 20 miles of a biolab studying the same disease family, how many were zoonotic versus lab accidental?
My common sense doesn't have that information on hand. Sounds to me like 'common sense' is a terrible way to try to investigate complicated things, eh?
No, I am saying that relying on 'common sense' is stupid because it can take you in any direction you want since you aren't going past a surface level evaluation. You just proved it by having to dig a little to try and refute my 'common sense' take.
It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so.
It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.
Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?
Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on.
That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure how virus research is usually done but I would have thought genome sequencing would be one of the first procedures you'd undertake, and there's no suggestion the Wuhan lab had done such sequencing (implying if they had, it was covered up).
Btw this seems to be a pretty thorough and technical overview of the various hypotheses: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00583-23
It concludes zoonotic origin to be the most likely, though certainly doesn't rule out other alternatives.
> Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made?
This is what the “lab leak” theory is. It’s why every conversation of lab leak is tied up with comments about gain of function, etc.
The interesting thing about SARS-COV-2 is that it can infect humans and cause illness (unlike the vast majority of known viruses). When people talk about the origin of the pandemic, it is the origin of this property specifically that they mean. The lab leak theory is that this property originated in a lab.
The paper I linked to above has as one hypothesis that it was a naturally occurring virus, cultures of which had been stored or worked on at the lab, and "leaked" by way of infection of workers there. Seems just as plausible as some source virus having been manipulated to increase its infectiousness to humans.
Not all the early cases could be traced back to the wet market, so there is no reason to suspect it started there if you don't already suspect a zoonotic spillover origin. And exponential curves ramp up slowly at first.
fwiw... there were posts floating around at the beginning of 2020 claiming that the epidemic was well established in Wuhan by December, and that cases were seen back to September, October.
It's unfortunate in so many way - admit a mistake was made, acknowledge the problem, and clean it up is so much more respectful of everybody's time and resources. Between Asian traditions of saving face, and US traditions of lawyers suing anything that moves, that approach never stood a chance of course.
Yes, covid was in the US months before we bothered to check and count cases. There were rumors of a virus spreading months before it was officially acknowledged
Most likely, Covid19 was introduced into USA from World Military Games[0], or from Russia in October-November 2019.
If someone went to Novosibirsk to check situation after blast at BSL4 lab "Vector", then (IMHO!) he may contracted the virus and spreaded it in USA after return, which (IMHO!) explains why USA three letter agency covers that blast.
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
None of these require gain of function research.
> You can explain some of the safeguards in place: BSL 3/4 facilities, regulatory / institutional oversight, security services, etc.
All of these have a long history of failures [1,2]. And those are just the acknowledged, some have actually been covered up [3].
> None of these require gain of function research.
Please elaborate on this. How should I go about anticipating which mutations in which genes / protein will result in resistance to a candidate therapy / molecule / mechanism that I am considering advancing into phase 1 trials?
I think a lot of it comes down to: if it has happened once, it is likely to happen again. If it was indeed a leak from WIV, which ended up killing millions, then what can we do to prevent that kind of thing from happening again in the future? Surely some more transparency would be helpful toward that goal.
I think real risk is testing these chimera viruses on mice with humanized cells.
Letting viruses evolve in-vivo is the problem especially when they are so viral.
There needs to be limitations on what R is allowed to be produced in-vivo, even more so because calculating the risk of virality of the outbreak is trivial if in-vitro studies are done.
Chimera virus. You mean like a spike protein expressing VSV? Do you think that (pseudo virus) requires a higher or lower BSL certification to work with than bonafide Coronavirus? Why?
And why are you worried about humanized mice and not human cell lines like HEK or CALU? Why not primary cells or organoids? Somewhere the “Outbreak” monkey is crying.
I admit that I am being a bit snarky and passive aggressive here; but for the past few years I have watched people butcher bioscience in online discussions. Imagine being a classically trained pianist and having to watch people misattribute all of Mozart’s work to Brahms. It is enough to drive anyone mad.
A classically trained pianist's profession does not carry the risk of killing millions of people! There is zero proof outside of circumstantial conjecture that SARS2 has a natural origin. Up to 20 million people have died due to an animal virus modified to be highly infectious towards humans and you expect everyone to just take your word for it?
I mean it sucks if it hurts your career or impacts your profession, but highly dangerous work needs to be reviewed and banned if need be!
I'm honestly under the impression that people are just too irresponsible to do some things. People are not machines who go into a bsl 4 lab and do proper safety precautions each and every day without slipping or becoming lax. If you have a lab making viruses, eventually, it will escape. If the viruses they are making are capable of shutting the whole world down for a year, then we really need to ask whether we should have them.its not a question of "is doing this useful?", because I'm sure it is. It is a question of is this worth doing even though we know it will inevitably go bad? You can talk about all the precautions and regulations you want, if people are involved then eventually someone or a group of someones will do something idiotic or malicious and break everything. There's literally an entire Wikipedia page about lab outbreaks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness.
If this research indeed caused the pandemic (and might cause more), do those things make the juice worth the squeeze?
A chance at a better flu vaccine doesn't seem like enough reward for what we all went through.
> You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance mutations reduce evolutionary fitness
A few problems with this. First modifying wild animal viruses to be infectious towards humans is different than modifying human viruses to model potential mutations. Modifying animal viruses to be infectious towards humans has done nothing but cause risks. Despite this research being conducted for almost a decade it has yet to predict or prevent any pandemic and probably started this one.
Additionally the idea that modifying animal viruses to easily transmit towards humans will allow us to develop vaccines is absurd. You can't test a vaccine that is not circulating in humans, so trails can not start until the pandemic has already started.
So yes, there should be moratorium on research that modifies infectious diseases! The public has a right to consent on whether such research is worth the risks.
To be fair, vaccines can be created in a matter of days now so the benefit of gain of function research to anticipate the virus that will cause the next pandemic is modest at best.
Temper this proposed modest benefit with the potential cost in terms of human adapted viruses being accidentially/intentionally released in the wild given the vagaries of both biolab security protocols in the labs accross the world conducting this kind of research and individual human psychology makes the justification of such research a pretty hard sell.
By this standard, the only people sufficiently qualified to make policy regarding this research are the people currently cashing checks to perform this research.
I've said the same thing since the beginning. "It would be weird if the world superpowers that develop nukes and other weapons of mass destruction wouldn't research biological warfare(and stuff)".
There was a lot of conflation, but it was almost entirely from the people attempting to debunk it, using the bioweapon one to claim no leak could happen. It was like they just couldn't understand those were two different things no matter how much people said "no, that's not what I'm saying".
I find it deeply disturbing that excuses as flimsy as "hate" or "possible hate crime reaction" would be used as justification to suppress the truth, especially with a situation as grave as COVID-19. Who is to say whether the uptick with Asians is causation and not just correlation? Meanwhile, thousands of Americans were dying daily during the peak of the pandemic. Everyone was scared, needed to know what was going on.
The average person was much more worried about the potential harm to millions of citizens than a much smaller uptick in one particular sector. It's of paramount importance that we don't repeat the mistakes that led to the pandemic in the first place. The only way we can do that is getting to the bottom of what happened.
If "possible Asian hate crimes" was the best excuse that the censorship industrial complex could come up with, then it is clear to me that any excuse would have done, and the conclusions I draw is that the suppression was 100% politically motivated. I want to know who was involved in making the decision to suppress, and to what ends they were trying to shape public opinion. At the minimum I want to know who I should be working to vote out of office.
How can I know who to vote for when we're normalizing lying as a justifiable policy up and down the chain of government communication and mass media?
It wasn't just the lab leak theory going around though, it was extremely tightly coupled with the "COVID bioweapon" conspiracy which really tainted it especially in the early days when there really wasn't much more info available other than it was first detected as a big outbreak in the same city as the coronavirus lab. In an ideal situation they'd be separable but they were so closely deployed trying to address the bioweapon conspiracy caught a lot of less out there discussion of the lab leak.
Also important though is it never really went away. For all the talk of censorship and suppression the possibility of a lab leak never left the investigation. It's also a very difficult thing to investigate without access to the labs to see what strains they were working on looked like which we still don't have afaik. It's been a process of eliminating other possiblities to some extent as other vectors that could be looked into were and turned out to be less likely.
> Also important though is it never really went away.
Sort of true -- but only because you can't kill the idea, the need to find the cause of the pandemic to avoid a repeat.
This is cold comfort to the people who were getting banned had their accounts cancelled for suggesting things that turned out to be actually true.
There's was a lot of collateral damage here, all in the name of... well I'm not sure. Trust is hard to build, and once broken takes a long time to regain.
The point is, as a society we're heading in the wrong direction. Freedom of speech is becoming freedom for those who keep their mouths shut.
Why? Because China was behind on vaccine development, and when they finally produced on it was not only late, but barely functional.
Late is one thing - if you release a bioweapon, it's far too suspicious to release a co-developed vaccine simultaneously.
But ineffective?
When it got out the WHO was parroting China's talking points from day one - it's not airborne, that's just a racist conspiracy. It was nuts.
And from the same group that was ignoring the big red flags from Taiwan's early warning system (Taiwan, who incidentally is refused membership as part of the world's China appeasement policy).
Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
They didn't develop it as a bioweapon - but that did not stop them from weaponising it after the fact.
> Then China shutdown domestic travel from Wuhan, while still allowing it internationally.
Lie[0]:
> On April 21, Ferguson provided an “update” to his April 5 column in which he acknowledged, “Data from sensors tracking actual flight paths would seem to indicate that no flights left from Wuhan itself to other countries in the world after January 23.”
The Chinese government responded to Covid the same damned way they responded to SARS; with a cover up - no joke, they were arresting doctors.
The biggest difference was that we didn't have someone like Gro Harlem Bruntlant [1] to competently handle the WHO's response [2] and call them out for their bullshit.
Both China and Taiwan looked at the SARS outbreak, and made efforts to prevent it from happening again.
Taiwan set up a robust early warning system in order to detect and contain such outbreaks in the future.
China on the other hand, set out to inject themselves into the WHO to protect themselves from future embarrassment [3].
It is funny how you say it so nonchalantly that the reason for not discussing lab leak theory is it lead to "marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent". However none of this applies to rhetoric against Russia, Middle East or any such country where US is at War with right now. How come no US citizen is attacking Russians, or Middle Easterners (Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans etc) in US soil when the Media is 24 x 7 discussing how these countries are the "Enemy" of the United States? Do you not see the dichotomy here?
It totally feels orchestrated. Someone somewhere in the US establishment needed an excuse to not discuss about the lab leak theories. So the attacks on people of Asian descent turned out to be the perfect excuse. That's what it comes across to me as an observer of US politics. There is literally no reason for censoring information on discussion of a lab leak that did not even happen on US soil but in Wuhan. If you can discuss Russia, 9/11, terror attacks in various parts of the globe, without US citizens going bonkers and attacking people of those races, I am pretty sure discussing lab leak theory would not piss US citizens off that much. But bring in race attacks angle and you have the people by your side asking for and justifying censorship.
Let me ask you another question: How do you think people in Asia discussed the COVID pandemic? Did people in China not question their own government (CCP) and its role in the pandemic? How sure are you that they all believed that the virus did not come from the Wuhan lab but, as per CCP, came from the West?
As Putin’s invasion of Ukraine intensifies, some Russian-themed businesses and Russian Americans in the United States are suddenly getting a frosty reception — and in a few cases, experiencing outright hostility. A Russian restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Russia House, was vandalized and the owner indicated that he thought anti-Russian sentiment might be to blame. Some Russian Americans say their children are being bullied at school.
“Americans were encouraged to sympathize with the people of Russia rather than the government. And that seems to me to be what is really different from what we’re seeing now, where you see people at protests with signs saying all Russians are to blame for Putin’s aggression,” he said.
Thulien pointed to another incident in which the parents of a close friend, a couple in their 80s, had their car scratched and vandalized overnight this week.
Also note that in the context of the US culture war, Russia is seen as an ally against the 'woke left', leading to the bizarre situation where Putin himself made references to Harry Potter author JK Rowling in a speech about the invasion of another sovereign country. This might shield Russians against at least some antagonism from that part of the political spectrum.
Okay and have these attacks stopped coverage against Russia in the US media? If the argument for censoring lab leak discussion is "attack on Asians" then why isn't coverage on Russia censored for "attack on Russians"?
There's a whole lot of Russian expats who have been quite vocal in supporting the war against Ukraine by Russia.
When Russians complain they're being victimised, it might behold you to consider that "Russian" is pretty much not an identifiable group amongst the wide range of eastern Europeans who have immigrated - including Ukrainians.
So when Russians complain they're being mistreated, is worth asking what they were doing at the time. Because it tends to be vocally supporting the Russian invasion[1] or the whole idea of it is being straight up invented and pushed by Kremlin propaganda agents[2].
The point I was making is not whether Russians feel mistreated or Asians feel mistreated etc. That is a separate debate. I am only making a limited point on "Lab leak theory was censored because it lead to rise in Asian hate crime". This makes absolutely no sense to me. Investigating possible lab leak theory that lead to one of the worst pandemics in recent times should be done irrespective of whether there is hate crime or not. Both have no correlation. And investigation can be done behind the scenes too. The problem is that there was absolutely no attempt at doing proper investigation. Whether it leads to conclusion or not is secondary.
Are you sure there was absolutely no attempt at doing a proper investigation? I wasn’t super fixed on the news at the time, but I do remember a number of reports, fact finding trips, etc by international and governmental bodies trying to investigate the origins.
There is absolutely not attempt at doing a proper investigation of blast in BSL4 lab "Vector", Novosibirsk, Russia on Sep 16 2019 and following epidemic of unknown origin in Siberia, which caused hospitals overwhelmed
Wuhan was hit by strain B in December. Strain A, original virus, was released about 2 months before that. Where it was for 2 months?
It is 100% equivalent. You are saying we will censor A topic because it will hurt X race. In the same breath, you will not censor B topic even if it hurts Y race. That is hypocrisy. Everyone sees through it. Some may choose to be blind to this hypocrisy. And that is not my problem.
Again, I'm not saying anything about that. I am saying that public opposition to some Russian persons is not because they're Russian it's because of their direct public actions and statements - as cited in my original post.
Claims of an anti-Russian bias or set of hate crimes is literal Kremlin propaganda which amongst other things was used to justify the Ukraine invasion, the South Ossetia invasion in Georgia, and has been a general talking point as to why Russia should consider invading many other of its neighbours.
I don't believe the main reason for suppression (insofar as that happened) and ridicule of the lab leak theory was a reasoned evaluation of any negative consequences. Rather, it became a partisan issue, and instead of being seen as an independent hypothesis that one should evaluate on its own merits, it became part of a whole package contentious issues (masks, vaccines, ivermectin, ...) that divided people along party lines. That the lab-leak hypothesis was pushed by the conspiracy crowd of course did not help.
Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people
even though it concerned less people than covid did.
You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
When lab leak hypotheses were able to rise above the conspiracy theories thanks to reasonable argumentation, it was finally heard. At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
> Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
I am pretty sure 9/11 - War on Terror saw a rise in aggression of muslim looking people even though it concerned less people than covid did.
And yet there was no censorship on conspiracy theories about the CIA being behind 9/11, for instance.
> Because you can't blame dear grandpa's death on Russia maybe however you try ?
And what does it have to do with State censorship of information? The State has no societal relationships (like grandpa/grandma/brother/sister/husband/wife/son/daughter etc) that can pressure it to shutdown flow of information. We are talking about State apparatus censoring information here. With Big Tech actively aiding it.
> You're pretending there was no such thing as people on TV blaming it on people eating "bat soup" and stuff like that.
I am not pretending anything. Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
> At first only on HN, thanks to which I first gave credence to the hypothesis and now you here you have it in mainstream media.
Many of us knew it from the very beginning once the censorship started that it has to do with lab leak. The only ones interested in suppressing information are the ones who have something to hide. Age old adage.
> It all takes time and debate, it's normal.
No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media. Even conspiracy theories were not snubbed or wiped off. Censorship was rampant only post COVID. It only tells me, as an observer of US politics, that the people high up in the US establishment, who had a stake in the Wuhan lab, had something really nasty to hide.
> The only conspiracy I see is from people, whether in the state apparatus or the scientific community that really did not want people to look too much into Gain OF Function research. I think the existence of such research and democratic control over is the debate now worth having.
Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories. In a couple of years we will have even more information about why information was censored and who were behind this censorship. Such things cannot be hidden for long. That's a given. But what we lose out now on is the scale of the things that went on behind the scenes. Now that these nefarious actors have had enough time to clean their evidence, even if you find any evidence it would be really weak leading to no indictments/charges forget prosecutions and convictions.
> No it is not normal. Even post 9/11 no conversation was censored in US media
No true. 9/11 was a nearly perfect military industrial play and no one could publicly question the US actions post the event. It felt like a lockstep war machine with vengeance at an all time high. You must’ve not lived through it.
Was born in late 80s. Lived through all of the major events post that. And no you could publicly question everything back then. There were no calls for cancellations or boycotts just because you believed in controversy theories.
Look up 9/11 Truthers movement and "Bush Did It!" to get an idea of the conspiracy theories that emerged right after 9/11. The "Bush Did It!" rallies took place in September 2002, just 1 year after 9/11.
Personally I don't believe in the 9/11 Truthers movement but I wouldn't even know about it if COVID level censorship was adopted back in 2001. Mainstream media was very different back then. Compared to what it has devolved into now.
> And no you could publicly question everything back then.
You're remembering things through rose-colored glasses. Ellen DeGeneres and Laura Dern, Bill Maher and the Dixie Chicks can tell stories of what happened in the 90s and 2000s when you went against the mainstream. In fact, people were cancelled over the silliest things (remember nipplegate?). Government censorship was also alive and well: Under the Bush junior administration, NASA and EPA scientists were not allowed to use the phrase 'global warming'.
State is mainly concerned with public order as far as I can tell.
What you call "State censorship" I call State asking politely CEOs who are in the same social class as most politicians to stop the spreading of (alledgedly false) rumors. And rumors, howevever false, have often cause a great deal of social unrest.
The reason it happens now and it did not happen it 2001... Well had you heard of Youtube in 2001 ? Facebook ? Probably not, I know I didn't.
All powers have somewhat regulated information, the US is a society where you can say almost anything except calling people to go and kill ${group).
I haven't heard of a lab-leak these proponent having been arrested, nor websites taken down etc... This my friend is state censorship.
Now if your concern is that most media is owned by billionaires and private law is law on their platform, well ok, but that's another concern.
> Also people blaming people eating "bat soup" has nothing to do with lab leak theory. Both are totally different issues altogether. I don't see how they are related?
Because the bat soup people where the first one to jump on the lab-leak theory. That did not help the cause. We use network of trust to digest information. I don't have no trust in people saying crazy stuff even though they might sometimes be right.
> Exactly. But having a debate now is mostly useless anyways. Whatever window of opportunity we had to investigate lab leak theory is now long gone. All the actors who wanted to cover their tracks have now had enough time to do so. So even if you are able to prove that lab leak did occur (to some degree) it won't lead to any indictments. And with an authoritarian CCP, good luck getting any leads directly from the labs itself.
I don't agree. It didn't matter more at the time to know if it was a lab-leak or not, situation had to be handled. Now that there's less urgency maybe we can investigate the dark corners and do something about it so it won't happen again. It m
atters more than ever.
> Most post COVID conspiracy theories have actually come true. Be it mask mandates, lockdowns, GoF, harmful vaccine side effects or lab leak theories
How are mask mandates and lockdowns conspiracists predictions turned true... ?
The real conspiracy was not telling people they should wear masks to protect others because there wasn't enought for everybody.
How was lockdown a conspiracy rather that government trying to pretend they were doing something ? I don't think the economy benefited fromt that\
Harmful vaccine side effects ? What about getting covid side-effects ? Listen you would have caught it no matter what and it would probably be worse. The discrepancy between deaths of vaccinated and unvaccinated people should tell you much.
GOF was known before too, it just wasn't in the public eye
At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique. He admired Vladimir Putin and defended Russian actions, so the Russian people weren’t a subject of his attacks.
That's a weird way to defend censorship of lab leak theory. Whatever floats your boat I guess.
> At the time the US had a president that routinely used race-baiting as a divisive political technique
What exactly did the US President, at that time, say specifically that exacerbated attacks on Asians, after breakout of COVID, and more importantly could be used as a justification for Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory? Don't forget that the lab leak theory was being suppressed on behest of the US Government by Big Tech and that suppression of information was not limited to just the US but entire World. As far as I remember, Trump was only the President of USA. He wasn't the President of the World. So you can't blame Trump if Big Tech is doing a Worldwide censorship of lab leak theory. I don't buy that argument at all.
I’m not defending anything about a lab leak. I’m addressing the previous poster’s question about why there were attacks on Asian Americans and not Russian ones.
The lab leak theory and weaponization theories were never squelched. The right wing in this country fantasizes that their viewpoints are marginalized while having their most extreme viewpoints broadcast on the top watched news programs in history. The idea that the lab theories were squelched was floated by those very same programs as part of their promotional formula.
> These conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US
Where? Can you back this up with clear evidence? And assuming this claim isn't simply made up, in what universe would it be a good strategy to address a USA specific problem by systematically and globally destroying the credibility of the entire scientific, media and public health establishment? The solution to violence is police; no one in their right mind would decide the best solution to this would be to establish a global conspiracy.
No, the above is all retroactive justification. We have the emails from the virologists as they planned the letter that claimed it was all a conspiracy theory. They weren't motivated by violent attacks. They were worried about being blamed for it, and that maybe it'd be harder to fund work in China in future. They say that, in writing.
The news was reporting on anti Asian feelings prior to covid. When covid hit this automatically became racist. Wearing a mask was racist. Bizarre. It caused many to ignore media/leaders because they were so obviously off base and constantly proven wrong and backtracking they lost credibility.
“There was a very well coordinated and intentional conflation of the term "lab leak" with the conspiracy theories”
Only by those wishing to shutdown legitimate discussion.
So back to the original question. Who was behind trying to change the narrative.
Dr. Fauci’s emails have shown he orchestrated deceiving the public. I’m not sure that is sufficient to explain the total media backlash against a lab-leak.
I don’t think people attacking Asians had that nuanced of a motive. More like: it came from Asia so they resented Asians, regardless of whether it was designed or leaked or whatever.
I can, and will, continue to advocate and affirm that criticizing the Chinese Communist Party - and people with Chinese descent - are 2 very different things, and that the former is acceptable.
“conspiracy theories lead to a marked rise in violent attacks on anyone of Asian descent in the US,”
Extremely dubious.
Your first paragraph was on point. Then you descend into ideologically driven speculation. You also seem to not grasp the basic chronology of how the early pro-China slant of the WHO plays into the whole gestalt. And overlook the fact that social media companies are filled with government workers who are paid to manipulate (censor) views that don’t align with those of the government, a government who in this case funded the research that caused the pandemic.
Hiding the truth because some bad people might do bad things is a pitiful excuse. Absolutely shameful to anyone with even a teardrop of integrity.
Few people want war with China. But I know of plenty that think China should be footing the bill and paying the entire world damages for their incompetence (or malice) in mishandling their bioweapon.
Communists have no integrity. ChiComs blamed the US for the virus, which is ironic, since the NIH knowingly or unwittingly (incompetence) funded it through Eco Health Alliance.
We need the same for the complete 180 on lockdowns. From universally against to forced lockdowns. I think people forget how strong the consensus (including medical) against lockdowns was.
I was in China during the outbreak. All western media and healthcare experts had to say about lockdowns was that they were counterproductive and have never been part of the medical playbook. And that it violates civil rights. A month later this seemed to be completely forgotten.
Personally, I believe this is all a function of the states ability to enforce it. It wasn’t possible before, but they found that it was possible now. But it was summarily rejected on principal prior to that.
There was never a consensus for or against lockdowns. Cant speak for the US and it's utterly broken media landscape but in Europe experts were asking for this from day one. It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.
This is revisionism. The only place in Europe that didn't lock down was Sweden and they were viciously attacked in the media for it, additionally Anders Tegnall was also attacked by other epidemiologists.
I followed it all very closely at the time. Tegnall and his mentor stood alone. With the exception of the Great Barrington crew and maybe Ioannidis, all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy. Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
The attempts to rewrite what happened in this whole thread are incredible to witness (not just your post, many others). It was only a few years ago! Our memories aren't that bad! And the internet is full of receipts on this. The idea there was robust academic debate about lockdowns or masks or the lab leak or anything else is a fantasy.
> all the other so-called experts were loudly and vocally demanding lockdowns as a strategy
This is not true. Denmark, Finland, Netherlands and UK [1] had their own versions of "Tegnell". That is, epidemiologists who recommended the let-it-rip, "herd immunity" strategy. In these countries, politicians finally decided to follow the majority consensus among countries, and ignore those epidemiologists who were among the "herd immunity" school of thought.
Even in New Zealand it was a somewhat close call, would the government listen to Michael Baker [2] as they eventually did, or Simon Thornley [3].
> Great Barrington meanwhile was viciously attacked, described as fringe, non-consensus, would kill millions etc.
Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
[1] "For a time, he advocated a herd immunity approach."
Vallance is in no way comparable to Tegnell. Valance and the other UK/SAGE "experts" were quite happy to invert their advice overnight on the basis of nothing. Like all the others they were making decisions based on politics and ideology, not a mature of understanding of science. Tegnell picked one position and stuck with it because there was no reason to change it, in that he was virtually alone.
> Maybe because it was somewhat fringe, definitely non-consensus, and would kill millions?
It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever. This isn't even up for debate anymore, the data is openly available and has been analyzed to death. These interventions simply did not work, and it was known from the start that they wouldn't work. Heck the idea they wouldn't work was the consensus right before 2020, which is why a "consensus" of these idiots is worth less than the electrons used to transmit it.
It's amazing how many people still never got the memo that lockdowns and masks had no effect whatsoever.
Do you have a source for that? It's been a while since I've looked at Covid numbers, so the only research I know off the top of my head that claims there was no effect is a meta-analysis by some economists, which originally claimed lockdowns only prevented 0.2% of deaths. After criticism, they had to re-evaluate their approach and arrived at 3.2%. However, not all objections were addressed, so who knows if there isn't another order of magnitude hiding somewhere.
Personally, I've been leaning towards lockdowns having the potential to be effective based on excess mortality in the nordics: Sweden was the only nordic country that did not lock down in March 2020, and it's also the only one of these countries that saw significant excess mortality in April 2020. There could of course be another reason for that, but until someone offers such, the lockdowns seem to be the obvious factor...
Perhaps your April 2020 number is correct but I think it's irrelevant because it is too time-boxed. I did an analysis (matching those by others) using the OECD excess deaths data and if you extend the time period through last fall, Sweden did either best (according to other's analysis) or second best (according to mine). Excess deaths actually continued after the pandemic has subsided in many countries (US and UK at least I recall) and I think it reasonable to assume the pandemic and pandemic policy had something to do with it. To judge overall success of policies you need to look at the whole time of the pandemic and its aftermath and the Swedes did better than almost everyone
Due to large numbers of immigration, Sweden has younger population than comparable nearby countries. Too many excess death analyses just take the average of 5 previous years (2015-2019) as the baseline, to compare yearly or weekly deaths to. But in countries with ageing population, number of yearly deaths have been on a slowly increasing linear trend already for a long time. If you ignore the trend, and only compare to the 2015-2019 average, all countries with ageing population would show continuously increasing excess deaths.
Also, Sweden has a peculiar bookkeeping system, and a surprisingly large number of deaths are recorded without precisely known date. If you only look at weekly death statistics, you will miss the "week 99" deaths from the yearly total.
All valid things to check but would also need to be checked for other OECD countries. I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging. Also I would not assume this had much of an effect. The way it might would be if a lot of younger people moved to Sweden during the pandemic . In general cross border movement slowed during that time
> I would not assume the OECD methodology does not take account of the aging.
And here you would assume very wrong.
OECD does indeed estimate excess mortality simply by comparing to the 2015-2019 averages:
"The expected number of deaths is based on the average number of deaths for the same week over recent years (in this case the previous five years, 2015-19). This baseline could be considered a lower estimate of the expected number of deaths since both population growth and an ageing population would be expected to push up the number of deaths observed each year."
"Importantly, given the impact of COVID-19 to the overall number of weekly deaths in 2020, the
average deaths for the period 2015-2019 continues to be used to calculate excess deaths in 2021,
and still applies as the base for 2022 and 2023 excess deaths."
From their: Methodology_All-cause-Excess-and-COVID-19-deaths_OECD.pdf
> Also I would not assume this had much of an effect.
Also here you are assuming somewhat wrong.
For Finland, the 2015–2019 average annual deaths is 53723. 2022 deaths were 63219. Thus the simple, OECD-style, estimate for excess mortality is 9496.
Whereas an age-structured model from Statistics Finland estimated 56158 deaths for 2022 from pre-covid trends. So the age-structure-aware excess mortality estimate is 7061 for 2022 for Finland.
Curious. At the time, I also made a pretty picture comparing deaths in 2020 to the 2015-2019 average (ignore the drop off at the end, as the data was incomplete at the time):
Early on Sweden had more deaths which led people to argue lockdowns worked, but then things subsided and other countries caught up and then surpassed it, leading to Sweden ending up near the bottom of the COVID death league tables (in Europe).
It's also important to remember in all this that the lockdown policy wasn't predicated on making a small difference you need powerful statistics to find. It was advertised as: anyone who doesn't lock down will experience mass deaths and full blown collapse. Epidemiologists claimed Sweden would experience double the usual death rate due to COVID, i.e. as many deaths from COVID as from all other causes combined! Their actual death rate:
There's a tiny bump in 2020, but at least part of that is simply noise due to 2019 having an unusually low death rate, so you'd expect it to be higher than normal in 2020 even without COVID.
Yes if you look exactly at the early pandemic then Sweden did worse than its immediate neighbors (but not worse than the rest of the OECD countries). But the real measure of success in policy has to include the rest of the pandemic and its aftermath. The others caught up.
But severity and timeline of lockdown measures varied from country to country, ie there was some diversity of opinion. Also note that even Sweden eventually implemented policies such as restricting opening hours of bars and restaurants, limiting the size of some gatherings, etc. for a time.
A scientific consensus is significantly different than media opinion.
Second, there is no "debate" regarding efficacy of masks and limiting exposure via quarantining. Masking reduces the likelihood of contracting SARS from others, and staying home reduces the spread to others and strain on hospitals. Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.
Millions died in the US alone, and a non-trivial percentage of them would likely still be alive if our public officials did a better job of respecting the medical professionals and their recommendations.
Oppositions to lockdowns were never about whether they would reduce deaths or not in the short term. Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly.
Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique.
My main question still remains, what would your plan have been if we still didnt have a vaccine? From my perspective lockdown supporters got completely bailed out by one of the greatest medical/scientific achievements in human history (developing and deploying an extremely effective vaccine within 1 year).
The only thing lockdowns do is push cases into the future.
Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.
I also don't think it was any stroke of luck that resulted in vaccines being made quickly. Our scientific establishments correctly devoted their resources to developing vaccines. A lot of us were closely following their development and knew that they were just around the corner. Even without advancements in MRNA technology, other types of vaccines were being made that could prevent the majority of deaths.
> Pushing cases into the future was always the stated goal of lockdowns. That was what "flatten the curve" meant. The idea was to accept some temporary consequences in order to prevent deaths until vaccines could be made.
The idea we needed to "flatten the curve until a vaccine" was obsolete the day many states closed their completely unused field hospitals. That should have been the indicator that covid wasn't nearly as bad as predicted. That was the day everything should have gone back to complete normal.
These lockdown "experts" never had an end game. They kept pushing the goal posts further and further until they completely lost the plot. That was one of my first objections to such mitigations. There was zero success criteria. Fuckers were just winging it. Which might be okay for some minimally invasive crap like enhanced handwashing protocols but it is absolutely bat-shit insane for something as impacting as lockdowns.
What we did was insane. I still have no idea how people look back, given all the data, and say "yup, what we did made sense". None of it make a single ounce of sense at all...
When "flatten the curve" came out as a slogan they told us 2 weeks. Absolutely no one in public health believed that would be true. It doesnt make sense on any level whatsoever. i mean it just beggars belief that they told the public that with a straight face. the only person i recall in early days of 2020 saying this was going to be many months if not years was Mike Osterholm which i respect for not gaslighting the public.
heres an article in the NYT about managing vaccine expectations.
also you argument falls apart when lockdowns (restrictions, npis, whatever you want to call them) continued way beyond vaccine rollout. I was first in line to get vaccinated and im very glad i did, because they promised us that would be a return to normal, but it wasnt for at least a year afterwards and i still havent been given an explanation why.
I'm just guessing, but an obvious reason would be because the vaccines were not as effective against the new variants? As in, while the vaccines still protected the vaccinated person, they did not effectively prevent spread of the disease, so other ways to do so remained relevant...
About a year after vaccines became available, only 60% or so of folks had received two doses [0]. Public messaging from the initial administration is an obvious contributor to the remaining 40%.
County / MSA hospital capacities, percent available ICU beds, ventilator use, admission increase rates, deaths, and various other stats were factored into restrictive policy decisions. However, this varies city by city and state by state (I suppose as an effect of federalism).
im sorry, but people who chose not to get vaccinated knew what they were doing and governments and public health officials holding everyone else hostage cause some people wanted to engage in risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
“im sorry, but people who chose not to [follow the speed limit] knew what they were doing and governments and public safety officials holding everyone else to a [speed limit] cause some people wanted to engage is risky behavior is not justifiable under any ethical framework i can think of.
no because this is a terrible analogy. Speeding endangers others who have not consented to that danger, not getting vaccinated has absolutely no societal risk in this particular scenario with covid.
If I could make my car crash proof (me getting vaccinated in this analogy), i would have no issues with people wanting to drive as fast as they like (they already do it anyway).
that was published in 2021 about data from march 2020 to nov 2020, its completely irrelevant. I mean can you at least try?
also, even if vaccines did stop transmission your argument still doesnt make sense. I can protect myself by being vaccinated. I dont give a shit if the person next to me is unvaccinated, im already protected myself. If you decide not to, you are consenting to increased risk.
Who would win - a peer reviewed article from the New England Journal of Medicine with published methodologies and citations? Or some internet rando with no medical background simply saying “that’s irrelevant”?
Also, you’re misreading the article; please review.
> Oppositions to lockdowns were always about tradeoffs and whether they were worth it. Its just such a boring critique.
Fully agreed; saving lives / community responsibility is the noble choice. Unfortunately, many folks in states with poor education (e.g., Texas), would make remarks questioning the actual existence of the virus - even after Trump contracted it and was treated at Walter Reed.
But, work on a vaccine began almost immediately, no? I trusted that shifting the focused lens of US policy toward medical research would produce some incredible results, especially with the private sector pharmaceutical behemoths battling it out, so to speak.
yes "started." there was literally no guarantee we would even have a vaccine at all. There was absolutely no historical precedent for development and deployment of a vaccine with a year of virus discovery. it was incredible achievement and government official literally bet the entire world economy on it for some reason i still cant understand.
> Anyone with a brain could understand that if people weren't in a position to breath on each other, the virus wouldnt spread as quickly.
This can be rephrased as "it's just obvious/common sense that lockdowns work" and it's a really common argument, but wrong.
Unfortunately there's nothing really obvious or intuitive about viruses. The Diamond Princess cruise ship showed right at the start that lockdowns would be ineffective. They locked down everyone on the cruise ship the moment the first outbreaks were confirmed, confining them to cabins. In the transmission model that lockdowns rely on that would have ended the outbreak immediately. But it didn't, instead people kept coming down with COVID completely at random, scattered all over the ship. From this two things could be concluded:
1. SARS-CoV-2 is airborne, that is, it can move long distances in gaseous clouds, i.e. through air ducts, by hanging in the air for long periods and other ways that lockdowns can't affect.
2. The clouds must have circulated through the ship, yet not everyone was susceptible.
This wasn't a terribly surprising result because investigators had concluded the same things about SARS-1 back in the day. SARS-1 clouds were able to move within apartment buildings even when everyone was locked down in their apartments, apparently via air ducts.
Some people pointed out at the time that this would render lockdowns irrelevant right back in March 2020, and were ignored, but time has proven them right. There's no correlation between lockdown severity and results.
I have a medical background and when the pandemic started I did a literature to see if masks had helped with other respiratory virus epidemics (as masking had been common for years in many Asian countries ). the results were decidedly unimpressive and I concluded masks might to something but it was not a big effect at a societal level. The mistake that many smart people without medical backgrounds make is assuming that if a measure "makes sense" from a basic science point of view, it must have a real effect in a patient or a society. Counter-intuitively this almost always turns out to be wrong.
I did a study of mask based on self reports early in the pandemic and I did show a significant slowing of the progress of the pandemic in states that had a high claimed rate of mask use. I had (I thought) some clever ways of eliminating other differences between states in my analysis and was surprised to see so much slowing. However, I am not sure which way the causality runs. I can easily see heavy masking making it such a bummer to go to bars (e.g.) that the lack of socialization caused the slowing.
But in summary, to your point, to the medically knowledgeable there was a lot of evidence before that masks would not do much (not nothing) and there is a lot more now that masks didn't do much
Please share your background so we can more accurately asses your credibility; saying that masks are ineffective is, at this point, painfully ignorant.
The nurses who thought so are either fired, dead, or updated their thinking.
No, saying masks work is the ignorant position here. There is no robust evidence that community masking has any effect, and people have looked hard for it. You can easily confirm this yourself because mask mandates had no impact whatsoever on case growth as can be seen by literally anyone who looks at the public test results data.
But if you don't trust your own eyes, maybe the Cochrane Collaboration is enough for you? They published a meta-review of mask studies.
Remember, you don't get to claim you're right because you fired everyone who pointed out you're wrong. It's painful to accept this, but masking was a lie from start to finish which is why the position of all the medical staff at the start was that masks don't seem to do anything and there's no evidence community masking would help. That position was correct. They changed it later for ideological reasons and the politician's fallacy.
These data showed statistically significant lower averages of SARS-CoV-2 daily infection in counties that passed mask mandates when compared with counties that did not.
The difference-in-difference analysis revealed a 16.9% reduction in predicted COVID-19 cases at the end of 30 days.
You might want to look into why meta reviews, particularly those plucked from popular COVID forums, aren't the bees knees you seem to think they are.
That paper isn't robust evidence, it's the kind of joke quality that typifies masks-work papers actually. RCTs are how you try to decide whether a medical intervention works, they're considered the gold standard for a reason.
Problems with this paper:
1. It's just a study of public data so should be trivially replicable, but they picked data points "via Microsoft Excel’s random number generator function" so it's non-replicable by design. Right up front this makes it incompetent work because there'd be no way to detect P-hacking.
2. Because it's not an RCT they can only show a correlation, not a causation, yet their claims are causal. An obvious confounder is that going out with a mask is no fun so you'd expect people to socialize more in places without a mandate, yet this isn't mentioned.
3. The effect size is tiny: ~4 cases a day! In counties with tens of thousands of people! This is NOT how mask mandates were advertised to the population.
4. "We did not record compliance with mask mandates". Yes I'm sure the residents of places like Anderson County Tennessee followed public health orders meticulously.
5. They ignore all the contradictory evidence.
Again, I cannot stress this enough, we know mask mandates don't work because of the times they were introduced with no change in case trends. Here's a single example:
Because the claim is "mask mandates always reduce transmission", it only takes one counter-example to disprove the claim. There are hundreds of charts like that one, but only one is required. That's the nature of falsifiability.
To conclude that mask mandates work you have to be able to explain the times when they didn't. Crap studies like this one (cited 3 times, well done for finding it) are produced by academia all the time, but they get ignored because they can't explain that, and the authors are invariably biased. These guys even cite a claimed 0.5% reduction in cases and call this "effective"! Imagine if governments had stated up front when imposing mask mandates for the first time, "we think this will be effective because it might reduce case counts by half a percent". What would people have thought of the sanity of this cost/benefit tradeoff, exactly?
> Unsurprisingly, the people attempting to debate this typically had no medical background whatsoever.
You don't need to have a "medical background" to debate lockdowns or masks. The decision to use those should never have been made exclusively by people with "medical backgrounds". It isn't their job. Just because the "medical people" say it's gonna work, doesn't mean it is worth the cost to society. And it isn't at all the place of people with "medical backgrounds" to figure out what those costs are and if they are worth it...
"Experts" shouldn't be decision-makers. They should only inform decision-makers. A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted. This was never done at all. Had it been done openenly and transparently we'd never have done lockdowns, school closures or anything else. Such things are completely insane no matter how much "medical experts" suggest to use them.
> A good decision-maker should take input from everybody who will be impacted.
You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms. It’s why we have speed limits. It’s why you have to wear a seatbelt. It’s why you can’t shoot fireworks off during a drought. It’s why products are restricted from being sold. The concept is fundamentally the same.
It’s also the same reason I’m glad cybersecurity policy, strategy, and operations are not a truly democratic process.
> Sarcasm aside, in a time of a medical emergency, it is the job of medical professionals to make decisions, because public safety supersedes individual freedoms.
This might be true for like the first week or two of march but after that... the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts". Those people were never elected, are not accountable at all for their actions, and were granted virtually unlimited control. That is what we call a dictatorship.
I would much, much rather have a diverse party of people calling the shots and not just one very specific niche class of "expert". Without a diverse set of people involved you'll wind up where we got... an extremely myopic fixation on exactly one single respiratory virus for two+ years to the complete disregard for the damage it caused to our children and communities.
I used to think technocracy would be awesome. What better than to have a bunch of experts doing things "the right way". But covid opened my eyes to how incredibly bad of an idea that is. Experts are only expert on one specific thing. All their advice and mandates are made through that narrow lens.
> You’re right; I’m really glad I polled thousands of fellow employees before forcing multifactor auth, or that time I chatted with a sysadmin to make sure they really did mean to open RDP on a public server before taking it offline.
But you also chatted with business people to get insight into the costs of forcing multifactor auth on people would be worth the security gains? Right? Because forcing 2FA is absolutely not something a security expert gets to decide. A good security expert would realize they are an advisor and not the person calling the shots. They know their role is to outline "what would happen if we did blah blah" and then let the business people know the pros and cons so said business people can make a decision. The business people, if they are any good, realize that there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are. Experts don't get to decide those tradeoffs at all...
I mean, could you imagine if the only input you got for a product, say a car seat, was just from a bunch of lawyers? The product would be absolutely lawsuit proof but I bet it would suck as a car seat.
> the response should absolutely not be solely in the hands of nothing but "medical experts"
This wasn't the case, and to say so is a blatant misrepresentation of the past. Did Fauci issue a travel ban, enact the Defense Production Act, or redirect the supply of medical equipment? Did the CDC somehow supersede congressional authority and directly fund research via the CARES Act? Were appellate courts no longer hearing cases regarding COVID and civil liberties?
> you also chatted with business people to get insight [...]
this reinforces my point: anyone who happens to be impacted is not entitled to input. Conversations between medical professionals and public officials were occurring every single day. But - do you think Trump was genuinely listening to his advisors?
> there are multiple often conflicting requirements and have the hard work of deciding what the right tradeoffs to make are
that's exactly my point, again. No one knew it was going to mutate that quickly and stay an issue. The tradeoff for doing less was more people dying.
Quarantining people who may have been exposed is a whole universe away from the lockdowns being discussed here, where whole cities, states and countries proactively prevented the free movement of their people who they had no reason to suspect had been exposed. Don't conflate these two.
It seems you may be looking to only discredit an argument instead of arguing the merits.
FTA:
> However, the use of quarantine and other measures for controlling epidemic diseases has always been controversial because such strategies raise political, ethical, and socioeconomic issues and require a careful balance between public interest and individual rights.
Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).
In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
> Here’s a list of about 30 examples since the 15th century where various governments have prevented the free movement of their people (because even then, they recognized that public health is more important than individual travel).
You mean those centuries before we truly recognized individual rights? Not a compelling argument. Again, quarantine of people who had possibly had exposure is very different than the proactive lockdown approach taken during COVID.
> In the face of a never-before-seen rapidly spreading and mutating virus, what the hell do you think medical professionals and governments ought to do? Stand by idly and let people die?
Inform the public and let them personally assess the level of risk they're willing to accept. You know, like they do with literally every other health question. Expanding protections for people facing dangerous working conditions because of the virus to opt out of work, and mandatory sick leave, is perfectly reasonable as well.
I don't know why people act like this obvious answer is completely out of the question. Will it result in more death? Quite possibly. Giving governments moral authority to limit people's rights in such a fashion is never the right answer though. Would you support the draft too?
> Individual rights have been recognized long before the founding of the United States, though.
Yes, and? Is it not true that we have progressively recognized more rights over time, often at the cost of blood? That our "rulers" do not and should not have de facto power over our lives to impede our movements, that they should not have power over what we choose to believe or decide with whom we may associate?
Furthermore, in none of the examples cited in the link you provided do the quarantine measures impact whole cities, states or nations, so I fail to see the relevance. Where quarantine measures were broad, they were widely recognized as shameful and discriminatory in retrospect (like imprisoning 30,000 prostitutes to stem venereal disease).
> This is impossible and irresponsible when you cannot accurately assess the risk.
Irresponsible? Do you think you have some responsibility to manage other people's lives for them? This really gets to the crux of the issue doesn't it, you think some people should have the right to make such decisions for others because those "others" aren't intelligent or well-informed enough to make these decisions for themselves. It's patriarchal, condescending and anti-democratic.
As for whether it's impossible, that's literally untrue. Sweden is proof by counterexample: they did exactly this and it turned out just fine. By the time the first lockdowns happened, we already had a reasonable assessment of the risks.
Instead the heavy-handed, duplicitous and authoritarian measures made the whole issue partisan, and so the US had one of the worst outcomes of all developed countries.
> The question of a draft is so unrelated I'm intentionally ignoring it.
Except it's not unrelated, it's just another example of curtailing civil liberties in the name of some ill-defined "collective good". People advocating for these positions simply take it as a given that their vision of the collective good needs no justification.
Editing to remove my comment; I’m done arguing with narrow-minded libertarians about effective government. It’s like arguing with a carnivore about why they should eat vegetables.
I'm not a libertarian, but do go on with your unjustified assumptions. We've gone through three rounds of you claiming you're right with no principled arguments or evidence, that it must be your way or the highway, and that the government responses were "effective" without considering obvious the most obvious counterexample that I cited.
You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive. That’s about as libertarian as it gets. You have supplied no evidence that measures taken were ineffective, because every developed country had some plan.
I’m the one that supplied multiple citations. How about you go find some to support your assertions, instead of trying to snipe and mince mine?
> You think the general public is equipped to quantify risk for a novel viral outbreak, and the government has no responsibility in attempting to keep its people alive.
It's interesting that you experience no cognitive dissonance between what I cited as a good example of what I'm talking about, Sweden, and this strawman of my position.
The article is conflating quarantines with lockdowns. They're not the same thing. Quarantines are more like the much-derided Great Barrington Declaration.
> It is also a known tool of any epidemic/pandemic management, it just has rarely been necessary at such scale given the intensity and wide distribution of COVID.
That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...
It was never a "known tool" to anybody. It was an insane, unproven pharmaceutical intervention that somehow, suddenly, became something "we always knew about".
> That must be why all the pandemic planning guides from various national health agencies specifically said do not do lockdowns, do no close schools and don't force masks...
Could you provide a citation? I’ve read the opposite from NIH, CDC, NHS, etc.
In Canada we wanted lockdowns pretty quickly and our prime minister said no and even refused to close the borders because he considered closing the borders to be racist. They tried to say border closures would have no effect on stopping covid.
It was an election year. Trump really didn't want to do anything that would upset the economy, and he gambled all his chips on "ignore it until it goes away." Public officials were begging and pleading to take measures to get R under control from the very start of exponential growth in the US, but they were not able to break through the political stonewall. Conservatives will say & do anything to get you to forget how hard they went on the wrong side of history.
People came to their senses when the following level of urgency was reached: "if you don't lockdown NOW, in two doubling periods -- one week -- every hospital will have a parking lot full of people slowly dying for want of a respirator. Do you want that news story as your legacy?"
It turns out that mechanical ventilators weren't very helpful. They did more harm than good for many patients, and overuse was a factor in the unusually high infection fatality rate seen in New York during the first phase of the pandemic. Ironically, some patients walking around today probably survived only because there was a shortage of ventilators.
The Dems didn't make Trump bet everything on "ignore it and it will go away." He could have pushed for public health measures in February 2020 ("Stop the China Virus, wear a MAGA mask!"). He didn't. He squandered the opportunity to use gentle R reduction, so we had to jump to strong R reduction with lockdowns.
I know that following the science doesn't come naturally to Republicans, but this is basic shit. If you had figured it out then, you wouldn't need to be on Trump daiper duty in 2023.
EDIT: Disclaimer, this was for one of the most principled politicians I've ever met. To this day, he will say he is an anarchist in public. (Although, he would say it in a pleasurable way)
Sure, so to change 0.5% of the vote, we would find people with demographics that people vote for.
For instance, if there is a women on the ballot, run another women because at least 0.5% of people vote for a women, so this splits the vote. Or find someone with similar/same names, bonus points if their signage only has their last name.
Anyone with the enemy's yard sign, gets the negative ad. Each neg ad was tested considerably.
There is a huge database of every voter, their petitions they signed, odds of being dem/gop, odds of voting, their pet names(if registered), etc... You go up to someone's house knowing they support guns because they signed a petition. Heck, the candidate would pretend they remembered the dog's name from a few years ago.
Lying and plausible deniability is like a daily thing. Looking back on it, I would have been sacrificed in a second for putting neg ads in people's mailboxes illegally.
Those are some heavy hitters. I feel like I forgot like 2 major stomach churning events, maybe I blocked them out. (Oh gosh, when I went to the enemy's campaign rally and put neg ads on everyone's cars, got followed by their staff, jumped over a fence/bush area to escape...) Okay, I'm only missing 1 stomach churning event from my memory. I think it was strategy related, maybe it had to do with old people.
Those sound like basic things that politicians or even salespeople do. You sound like you went in naive, got your mind blown, and now believe anything is possible. I hate to break it to you but you haven't uncovered any shocking secrets and your 'destroy the economy so we can beat Trump even though he is defeating himself with his handling of the epidemic' theory doesn't water.
Democrats are not some monolithic entity. A 'democrat' is basically someone in the US who votes who has empathy for others and/or isn't in favor of Christian religious doctrine as a basis for legislating morality and/or thinks that making it super easy for anyone to buy a gun makes gun violence exponentially more likely.
I really doubt they all coordinated to destroy the livelihood of millions of American's to make the president look bad when he was doing it just fine by himself day after day.
If you are going to go the conspiracy route why not look to Republican politicians? They are much more unified and they universally hate Trump (do you even remember the primary debates? He literally insulted other opponent's families) and they only got in line because he demonstrated he could destroy their career by motivating his base to action. They wanted him gone just as much as anyone else -- they just couldn't say or do anything overt about it.
But no, that didn't happen either. A idiotic narcissist who refuses to listen to anyone and is obsessed with how he looks under stage lights more than welfare of the American people can lose an election just fine on his own.
The question makes no sense. What democrats? What scientists? About what?
Do you think that men aged between 30 and 35 ignored wives?
Can you answer such a vague and useless question?
'Democrats', 'scientists', and 'ignored (about subject)' and 'at which point in time' are not things that you can just assume and the fact that you think you can group all these things into one question is baffling.
There's nothing to debunk. That's the entire point. He's trying to prop up his claims with more claims. If we cannot determine the veracity of his anecdotes, they are of no use to us in determining the validity of his conclusions.
His entire response could be boiled down to "Trust me, bro".
I get the feeling he knows he cannot defend his position based on either commonly known information or on reasoning about the situation. So he has to purport to have special information that most don't. And that special information, which you cannot have, is enough to turn everything around. But he also won't give you enough information to independently verify. He won't tell you which campaigns he did these things for, which politicians he worked for. But they were top men. Top. Men.
We've "convinced" you of the thing you came into this thread with. Or is this just a thinly veiled attempt at making others backtrack their words or apologize for impugning your integrity?
If you were truly concerned with "Science and Data", you would realize that vague, unverifiable anecdotes are only persuasive to those who are already persuaded. They are not a valid way to make a point.
This is a weird topic to me, because I'm unsure if I live in a different bubble, or we're all just kind of playing the euphemism game (with a bit of self censorship on top) or what. Because what happened is hardly ambiguous. One thing, more than any, that the Twitter files provided evidence of was various governmental organizations, and individuals, pressuring at least one large tech company to censor for often arbitrary, and sometimes overtly fake, reasons. I think the chances of that behavior being limited to Twitter, or even tech companies in general, are zero.
The tech companies are obviously, at the minimum, complicit. Because "pressure" is just that - pressure. When the 'Russian trolls' narrative was being built up in Congress, Twitter knew it was entirely fabricated, and even referred to the requests as coming from "Congressional Trolls", and then they gave those said trolls nearly everything they wanted, and remained absolutely silent about what was happening. That strongly reflects upon the character, or lack thereof, of former Twitter leadership - but the source is the government.
The large scale centralization of speech has created an angle shoot of the 1st amendment. Pressure a handful of companies into censoring whatever you want censored and you likely achieve even more than a law would have, since you end up censoring it on a far larger scale than just domestically. Expecting politicians of a country to actually care about the intent of the constitution of that country is clearly no longer a reasonable expectation to have.
It wasn't taboo - the associated conspiracy theory about the leak being a deliberate release of a bio-weapon was rightly dismissed.
The idea of it being an accidental release though was discussed a lot; it merely lacked strong evidence (no doubt partly due to Chinese obfuscation) to take pole position against the meat markets theory.
Additionally there was definitely a ridiculous and likely harmful "anti-racist" thrust by the usual censorious suspects, including those you mention that tried to control conversation, as they do.
Unfortunately the merging of the two theories at the time (which I think is continued here by wrongly suggesting the accidental-leak case was "taboo") has never helped clear discussion.
The latest poll from the public opinion fact tank shows that misinformation around the virus is still king, even as fact checkers and public health officials work furiously to dispel it and save American lives.
A total of 23% of adults polled said they believe the virus was created intentionally. This is almost certainly not true, according to the genetic detectives studying the virus’s origins.
The theory that the virus originated in a lab was one repeatedly shared on One America News Network, a far-right channel favored by President Donald Trump.
From the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, conspiracy theories about the origin and scale of the disease were spread on online platforms.
Among these were the false claim that the virus was part of a Chinese covert biological weapons programme.
The claim that the virus was man-made has been pushed by numerous conspiracy groups on Facebook, obscure Twitter accounts and even found its way on to primetime Russian state TV."
Now what we read is that the virus was man made and the WIV was doing secret military work for the PLA, with the idea being to create a virus and vaccine simultaneously so the attacker controls who survives i.e. a bioweapon. That's the same as what the BBC called a false claim and conspiracy theory.
The reason this investigation was initially done by anonymous people who found each other via backchannels on Twitter is because suppression of this discussion was near total.
> Now what we read is that the virus was man made and the WIV was doing secret military work for the PLA, with the idea being to create a virus and vaccine simultaneously so the attacker controls who survives i.e. a bioweapon. That's the same as what the BBC called a false claim and conspiracy theory.
In a tabloid, recycling claims that have already quite questionable without any additional evidence (ie. the Mojiang mine stuff is not nearly as cut-and-dry as this article makes it out to be).
The Times isn't a tabloid either, jesus christ. Have you ever actually lived in the UK? It feels like you're just making things up to try and muddy the waters here, in the hope of making all this stuff go away.
To assist: The Times was founded in the 1700s and was the first newspaper in the world to use that name, a name that has been copied many times due to its reputation. In 2004 they switched to a compact paper form of the size used by tabloid papers, but that didn't affect the content or style and didn't make it a "tabloid paper" in the sense you're trying to use here.
Was it really taboo? I didn’t get this feeling where I live (admittedly not the USA). It’s just that it became clear pretty quickly that the investigation was going nowhere as China wasn’t going to honestly cooperate. That didn’t leave much to discuss.
For the official response, it was to be expected. The UN does plenty of compromises with authoritarian countries for the sake of being able to operate. It would have been surprising to see the WHO press China.
Jon Stewart was the first to call this into question publicly, which was brave at the time. Watch Colbert push back on Stewart’s line of reasoning: https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8
Honestly questioning anything covid-related was taboo at that time, including the vaccines, masks, ivermectin, etc. Please note, I am not making any claims about these things, other than it was taboo to question anything “official sources” stated.
Lots of people thinking you are an idiot does not mean you can't say it. I saw plenty of people saying things about vaccines, masks, ivermectin.
But yes, when hundreds of thousands of people are dying globally, I think patience for those things wears thin in a personal capacity.
But I would seriously question whether something is really 'taboo' if ~half of the country is watching media outlets where they ask these questions regularly, which is the case in the domestic US.
It is exactly the attitude you are still exhibiting that was the problem. “We’re in a crisis, no time to ask questions. Fall in line or you’re a far right conspiracy theorist/idiot.”
It is a legitimate opinion and not censorious that if you are going and telling people to take ivermectin for covid you are legitimately harming people.
Having that attitude is not "a problem", having opinions on dumb stuff people say is not censorious.
This new interpretation that freedom of speech means freedom from having people criticize you is novel.
> He doesn't fall into the left or right dichotomy.
I am a fan of Jon Stewart, but the fact that I have never heard someone on the right-wing claim that Jon Stewart is non-partisan while I hear it frequently from mainstream democrats should tell you something about the veracity of the claim.
He's never run for political office or anything like that so most of what we can glean is from his shows, which for sure attack the right more than the left but don't advance their own policy proposals.
The most overt stuff he has done politically is the late 2000s rally with Colbert which was very middle-of-the-road decorum-focused Democrat in tone, I don't think there's a lot of evidence for him being "hard left". If I had to guess, I think he'd be more in line with the Obama / Biden type camp than Sanders.
Very sorry about your Dad, but you have no evidence vaccination was related to his ALS. Hundred of millions of people were vaccinated in short period of time, and there is obviously a group of people who were always going to develop ALS within that time frame. Given the large n of the first group, overlap was inevitable. Temporal proximity doesn't establish causation when there's an overlap.
It is possible you are right and it was just a coincidence - but it is also possible that the vaccine was the trigger for ALS to develop. We don’t have enough evidence yet to confidently say
Based on all available evidence, it is probable I am right. We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.
You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all. That single person was most likely going to develop ALS at the time whether he had been vaccinated or not.
> We have no evidence of increased rate of incidence of ALS, which you would expect to see given how many people were vaccinated.
What data do we have on the incidence of ALS between 2019 and now?
Even pre-2019, there appears to be a slight increase in incidence of ALS over time, although not statistically significant [0] – which could mean the increase isn't real, but could also mean it is real but studies thus far have lacked the statistical power to confirm it.
So, if it is true that ALS incidence is increasing anyway, the question then must be–has the rate of increase accelerated since 2019? I'm not aware of any published data on that topic. Furthermore, there is also some evidence that COVID-19 infection can be a trigger for onset of ALS in susceptible individuals, [1] so even if there is some pandemic-associated acceleration in incidence increase, it may be difficult to disentangle to what extent it is due to infection versus vaccination.
> You linked to a single case report. It does not establish any type of causal link at all.
A case report – even a single one – is evidence. Only weak evidence, but even weak evidence is evidence. Certainly not strong enough to establish anything - but a single case report is enough to increase the epistemic probability, even if only by a little bit. Establish is more systematic review of multiple high quality studies territory, which is at the opposite end of the strength of evidence spectrum from case reports.
I think we are likely talking about something with a rather small effect size. With a sufficiently small effect size, something can be entirely real but also impossible in practice to statistically demonstrate.
As the other commenter said, I'd like to add an example because I think it's worth it adding this to the discussion given that you are angry about a death in your family.
Just imagine, there are - to pick an example - new cancer cases (or anything really) every single day. Therefore, the vaccination will coincide with the diagnosis perfectly for a pretty large number of people.
But as should be obvious, that is not because of the vaccine. For there to be no diseases exactly following vaccinations there would have to be a stop of all disease for a week or two for anyone getting vaccinated. Now that would be an outlier.
If you want to see if a disease cold be because of vaccination you would at the very least have to show that among those getting vaccinated statistically significantly more people get the disease than normal.
Just remember, normal life and normal things - including all kinds of diseases - go on all the time. Vaccinations take place in this context, not "outside the environment" (to use a quote from a famous sketch).
What are you saying? It has nothing to do with what I wrote. Please remain constructive - and respond to what I actually wrote, not to imagined slights. Thank you. And the "hand wave" is what you are doing - read what I wrote, it is normal to have many such things coincide in timing. Timing alone is not proof of anything, since it is completely normal and expected with a constant stream of new disease. You have to show a (statistically) significant rise in numbers - as a first step, that alone still would not be proof either. Others have pointed that out too.
Given the scale of both normal disease occurrence and of the vaccination campaign, it is expected and normal for a very large number of people to get sick after vaccination - simply due to chance.
If you read into that purely statistical statement a claim of vaccinations not having any side effects than you need to read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote. One has nothing to do with the other, and I'm only addressing the one thing. Of course you can have problems due to vaccination, but you can not "hand-wave" any single random event into that category, especially when it's obvious you fail to even consider the large amount of "normally sick" cases that are bound to happen simply by random chance of them occurring all the time either way.
The fun thing about claims about Hacker News opinion is that you can actually fact check it on Algolia. [0]
Most of it is either people saying that we can't know whether the lab leak is true or not and people who are claiming persecution on "Reddit/the Media/etc" because "they" are keeping the lab leak theory from being discussed.
> I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory
It was politicized.
At the same time, it was a "theory" based on little to no evidence early on. Rather than let scientists work through and figure things out, people were shouting it through the roof as if it was confirmed. Basically, it was an answer in search of evidence, rather than using the evidence to direct the answer.
There was a lot of pushback against that sort of talk, especially here.
Couple that with a divisive administration here in the US that caused confusion and chaos, there was little to no hope for it being anything other than taboo.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I fell for Fauci's lies. I saw him as a pillar of truth and science against the backdrop of Trump's idiocracy. So, I can empathize with those who still think he's a good person, they have not been exposed to all the evidence of how he orchestrated lies and smears to cover up the lab leak theory, and how he funded the gain of function research that likely lead to the pandemic (even though gain of function was outlawed in the US). He even lied about it under oath. And why has nothing happened? Because big pharma is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic and they are the biggest advertisers on corporate mainstream media. The whole thing is sick and twisted. And I know this sound like a conspiracy nut to those who have not looked into this deeply, but it is what it is.
It’s ridiculous that your comment has been downvoted. This is a great article. Those who defend Fauci and the establishment narrative do so with a religious fervor. No amount of reasoning or logic seems to get through to them.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a whole thing on how the idea initially became politicized in the US. The short of it was that when Trump was downplaying the danger of human-to-human transmission early on because his friend Xi told him that wasn't happening Senator Tom Cotton started talking up the idea that the Chinese government might be lying about because it escaped from a government lab. But then there was a game of telephone and it turned into the idea it was a Chinese bioweapon.
Jim Geraghty of National Review has written a lot about this, as he pretty early advocated for the possibility of the lab leak. Because he writes for a right-leaning publication though, there are lots of ad hominem attacks thrown his way that are pretty baseless.
Not from the US, but i don't see how it was ever a "taboo". The general gist was "we don't know" or "unlikely". However, what i did see on Social Media, was a bunch of nutjobs pushing their nonsense about "deep state", "population control" and so on.
I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
In many ways, it makes sense to try to get the entire population on board with a single narrative, in order to have a coherent response to an emerging situation. On the other hand, it opens the doors to corruption by leaving those in charge with no credible voices willing to criticize or draw attention to the holes in that narrative.
>I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
That just sounds like an unfounded conspiracy theory.
More likely is that extreme statements on social media generate more reactions, which is more engagement, so they get more traction in feeds because that is what social media is optimised to do, irrespective of what the content is.
And these nutjobs routinely invoked the term "lab leak", which organically led to an association in most people's minds between the term "lab leak" and crazy conspiracy theories.
These nutjobs were all over Twitter, Facebook & Co. Usually platforms that reward engagement with more visibility. The people who were pushing this narrative were relying heavily on a mix of gullible people, fake accounts and bots. Many accounts being merely a few weeks or up to a month old. This is essentially the reason i left Twitter in the first place. I'm observing the conspiracy milieu for over 10 years now. This tactic isn't new, they already used this in 2009 to push comments on certain websites to their side. Back then, it was mostly manual work. Also, thanks to social media, they don't need help from trashy news agencies to be seen.
> I believe that these 'nutjobs' were promoted to the forefront of popular discussion for purposes of sensationalism and to discredit more careful dissenting voices by association.
It's interesting that this social media promoting action was so coordinated that it is happening on this very thread in Hacker News.
The problem was that almost nobody was saying the source 'might' have been a lab leak - they were saying that the source was 'definitely' a lab leak and then usually adding that Fauci sponsored gain of function research into viruses and then into conspiracy theory land.
Most of us were open to the idea of a lab leak but the disinformation was so hard around the topic that sensible people had to push back and the loser was the legitimate 'theory' that a lab leak was a possible source.
No no no. The problem was that talking about a lab leak in any way was considered deplorable. So much so that the only people who still dared to speak about the lab leak in public were outcasts, lunatics, and people who didn't have a reputation that could be destroyed.
In times of crisis a large fraction of the population will latch on to authoritarianism. This is universally true, and there are many historical and contemporary examples. The world is messy and complicated and people desperately want simple answers. People will cheer on the collapse of hard-won civil rights and the advent of military rule if they believe it's necessary for the greater good. Thankfully it didn't come to this during covid. But not because there was an invisible line in the sand that nobody dared to cross. People were not held in check by their principles, covid just didn't "necessitate" an even harsher response.
This is why many people are so upset about the censorship surrounding the lab leak theory. They got a rude awakening. One, that fundamental rights like free speech can curbed very effectively, and two, that it's the citizenry itself that demands their rights be taken away. It's scary to be suddenly robbed of naïve notions about rights and process and governance.
You guys can actually just search old Hacker News discussions and also look at old media reporting to see that this narrative of "media suppression" is just blatantly false.
GP is absolutely correct - people reacted negatively (and remind that someone not liking what you say does not mean you are censored) because people (including now in this thread) are saying that there is 'definite proof of lab leak' when that is just bull?
The best book I've read on the topic of the lab leak theory is "Viral" by Alina Chan & Matt Ridley. It goes into the nitty-gritty scientific detail as well, but also covers some of the things you mentioned too.
Another good book is Dark Winter by epidemiologist Raina MacIntyre. Touches on COVID origin and similarity of the inital market excuse to the Sverdlovsk lab leak coverup by Soviets
I HN-submitted the parent article originally. By way of demonstrating topic familiarity, I have a track record of submitting origns content to HN. (It usually founders or gets user-flagged). I didn't guess that this one would garner quite so much attention.
>I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory
IMO part of it was a lot of self-preservation instinct of biomedical research scientists, operating in the context of a calcified monopsony of a national funding organization. In other words, any biomedical scientist's legitimizing LLH too stridently would not necesssrily have healthy to one's grant fundng prospects.
Caveating that 'none of the content of this comment necessarily reflects the opinion of BiosafetyNow', I also serve on BiosafetyNow's leadership team. BN was formed in the wake of the wagon-circling & gaslighting of the lab leak hyp.
https://biosafetynow.org/
(Richard Ebright, mentioned elsewhere in the comments, is also on the leadership team. More familiar names are Colin Butler, & Milton Leitenberg).
We recently released a petition to ban ePPP research (i.e. 'GoF')
It just passed 1000 signatures yesterday. I would love for concerned visitors to these comments to add their name.
Despite that we advocate a simple ban today, our org has in its mission statement to see a moratorium on ePPP research until sufficent biosafety measures are put in place whereupon it becomes (highly) regulated ePPP researxh instead of out-and-out banned. The definition of 'sufficient' is not left to scientists alone to determine, and I contribute toward representing the non-scientist public to advocate for what should be considered sufficient biosafety measures.(Pro-tip: More representation of the non-scientist public remains needed here :) )
The nonprofit still operates on a shoestring budget, so if readers were inclined to help with that, it would be most appreciated. (Can also find origins censorship-themed merchandise which some folks might find fun :) )
If you'd like to volunteer your talents - software and otherwise - to BiosafetyNow's advocacy effort, it would be similarly most welcome.
I think the problem is that moderates think you can have democracy without having to participate in politics which can sometimes become costly. Extremists already accepted the costs and reap the rewards (control, influnce, power) because people won't stand up to them.
There seems to be a tendency for many to believe that academics, researchers, and physicians are above personal and political bias, particularly when it comes to their fields. But as far as I can tell, it largely stemmed from the fact that some of the earliest insinuations around the origins came from fringe right-wing talking heads, and particularly people surrounding Donald Trump, immediately caused many in positions of power, either in academic or media circles, to shut down such notions as racism, xenophobic, anti-intellectual conspiracy theories not based on facts. This despite those same people were largely coming to that conclusion in an anti-intellectual manner also not based on facts.
There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus. Intervention at a wet market or in a wuhan lab could have happened. However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures. Authorities who put significant resources forward to save lives. Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.
Both can be true: It originated in a lab, and the distrust that inspired is still killing many. It's dangerous to talk about it because it's still killing people.
If we found out 100% the lab theory is false, you'd still have millions who want it to be true and who want to be enraged. You have millions who want to put themselves at risk. There are larger problems with society than this virus. That's what this conspiracy uncovered.
Uh if it came from the lab we could still today have a shot at finding out what went wrong and then use that to improve safety at other labs worldwide. Assuming relevant records weren’t destroyed, anyway. If we can tell that they were destroyed, then USA et al should immediately stop supporting Chinese virology research in any way and pressure them to close the facilities via sanctions etc. In order to find out either of these things, we need an investigation. This all seems pretty straightforwardly true, and it totally drowns out any other second order concerns IMO.
We're too far removed from the time and place to accurately determine what happened. Even if we had first-hand witnesses or documentation, the disinformation 'aura' around the whole thing makes it impossible to get the honest truth out. There's no chain of custody for evidence that you, yourself would trust. That's what I mean that at this point it doesn't matter what the reality was, the damage is still compounding from it. The absolute worst thing out of the last 3 years is the terrible messaging from authority figures to unify around public safety. To say 1 thing and impress upon everyone the legitimacy of the danger, without distracting from that message and leveling conspiracies. From an objective historical point of view we want to know what happened, but no one will be able to confirm the legitimacy of that now.
It's still killing people. I directly vaccinated thousands in Los Angeles, I had several family members die, and 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category.
Never have we seen disinformation used to harm so many. It's too dangerous to talk about, and if we found the truth no one could corroborate it or convince others of it. It is done, millions are dead.
As a sidelong thought, I'm convinced in this information age that there is no truth. The truth is anything you want it to be if you can inspire a viral cult around a contrarian thought. I'm sorry if I just sound so jaded.
I still remember assisting a woman who /wanted/ the vaccine while her husband screamed at us outside the tape line with officers nearby - screaming about how the government was trying to kill black Americans and citing events like Tuskegee. We earned that, and I still see the fear in his eyes when we swabbed her arm.
You might want to look into what disinformation you were personally subjected to that brought you to your own perspective. People who aired their own personal vaccine adverse event experiences were maligned, shamed and cancelled. What makes you think you have the correct information on vaccine adverse events?
I personally know 3 people who have had life altering negative effects due to the vaccine, including myself. You no doubt think that is a lie or a statistical anomaly. What you've missed is that it is ridiculously hard to register an adverse event, due to procedural process, and the negative bias of medical practitioners such as yourself who are unwilling to attribute an event to a recent vaccine, or blame it on the virus itself (without any symptoms of course).
The 'Trusted News Initiative' is one mans life-saving purveyor of truth, and another mans very obvious propaganda network.
I would encourage you to look at an Israeli study "Survey of reported symptoms after a third vaccination Of Pfizer against 19-COVID".
4% of men experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
7% of women experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
A survey based approach is more likely to get better statical results IMO because it removes the laborious reporting procedure as well as medical practitioner bias.
I'm fed up of self-righteous do-gooders who think they have an exclusive view of 'the truth'. I wouldn't care so much about it were it not for the negative effect those do-gooder's actions can have on other people's health, as it did in my own case.
Also, the team lead I worked with for 3 months was 1 of the 100,000 or so that saw adverse effects. Last day of our deployment in LA county, he received the vaccine in preparation to go home. He was in the hospital for 2 weeks because fluid started to pool in the sac that contains your heart. He nearly died before they could get that under control. He went home for a month and then went back out again on another deployment.
I think this goes to the "is 1 life more important than 100,000" argument. The vaccine saved millions and we are barely celebrating that fact. Even if you say "well there are long-COVID effects" -> the alternative is death. The alternative is nothing happens to you and you become a vehicle for someone else's death. Unless you were planing to isolate for the rest of your life, you became an inherent risk to others for a virus that was spreading too fast.
My great uncle was put into an old folks home to sequester with the others in that risk category, and 1 of the nurses spread it among the staff. 13 people died. Disinformation convinced reckless people that there's reasons to not get the vaccine, and then they went out and did reckless things because they doubted the legitimacy of the danger. People who walked into hospitals without masks, who spit at others taking their own precautions, people who violently attacked service staff in supermarkets because they felt the whole thing was an attack on their livelihood and freedom.
I remember being in Marana, AZ the week that Pfizer was cleared for kids 12 and up. We were stationed outside a school, and for the last 2 days we had watched teachers going in and out of the facility back and forth to their cars to get random things. Every time 1 walked past we asked if they had questions for us, if they wanted to know about the vaccine, and that they could talk to us without committing to anything. Surely these educators were interested in protecting their students? AZ was a strange place. They were more concerned with recounting the election for the 2nd time. The state gov was actively hostile and tried to keep us out so the county we were working within took them to court citing a clause in their constitution that they could request assistance if it was a health concern. We moved from that site a day later, we had vaccinated just 27 people.
To put things in perspective, in LA we did nearly a million vaccinations. In AZ we reached just under 13,000 over 3 months.
I am acknowledging that we were both surrounded by propaganda/disinformation, and both affected by it. You will not find the objective truth to any of this 3 years later, so far from Wuhan, and with this much political influence behind investigating it.
The deaths were right in front of them, but the party told them to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears. The org I work for was actually responsible for vaccinating my own grandparents. My grandpa still caught covid and seemed like he was coming out of it. Then he got pneumonia as a complication from it and died that July 4th weekend I got home.
I'm glad I have a monopoly on truth as a self-righteous, do-gooder it really helped me preserve my family tree . I hope in posterity people understand how amazing it was to see the world support this humanitarian mission, for all its faults. May you live a long life.
I'm not sure where you got the 1 in 100,000 from. As I mentioned in the previous post, an Israeli Ministry of Health survey of 2000 people found that 4% of men and 7% of females experienced chest pain after a booster shot.
Additionally a Pfizer report dated Aug 2022 showed the company observed 1.6 million adverse events covering nearly every organ system:
This company has been fined billions for their shady practices. Not sure why anyone would trust their data. Plenty of information available about how dodgy their initial trials were conducted and reported for anyone who cares to look.
Huge incentives to hospitals for reporting any deaths as covid (around $30k per person if I remember correctly), and huge disincentives to report adverse events (threat of revoking medical license, difficult reporting procedure, biased doctors etc). As a result, the stats are skewed extremely in favor of vaccination.
Add into the mix lockdowns causing huge collateral damage. While you pat yourself on the back for protecting your family, it is entirely plausible that the vaccination campaign along with the lockdowns caused more deaths than they actually saved. Reports from John's Hopkins and the Fraser Institute found this to be true.
Good intentions are well and good, and I'm glad that you're proud of your achievements. Next time I hope there's more humility amongst proponents of mRNA vaccines and lockdowns, and that they consider the possibility that they could be wrong, and their actions may actually cause more damage than if they did nothing at all. Humility was missing.
Why did, an educated RN, believe this? And why was she trying to spread the idea? Is this RN also (generally) an anti-vaxxer? I'm not sure if it is the location of so many media outlets, but Los Angeles County (and Orange County) does seem to be the epicenter of anti-vaxxer culture in the US.
> 1 of my aunts - an RN - is getting reinstated after 2 years because she was fired for telling people "the jab will kill you". This was after she tried to convince my other aunt - another RN - that she should not get the vaccine while being in a risk category
It's crazy how many nurses don't trust science and news reports. Here in Belgium it was a big problem too. So many of them seem to be very cynical about and have serious distrust in big pharma while they themselves administer drugs that make (most) patients better. How they can just overlook that and keep their jobs is beyond me (no offense meant to your family)
They do get to see how the sausage is made. Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive? Is it more likely that such nurses are completely delusional, or that they have information or experience that you or I don’t? Keep in mind that everyone in medicine has a financial and career incentive which points towards aligning with and advocating for the system they are so invested in, so there would be a tendency for this point of view to be under expressed, if anything.
Not sure what sausage they see being made. They're trained to evaluate patients, carry out emergency procedures, take measurements and administer medicine as instructed by a doctor. It's a hell of a job, hard, stressful, thankless and underpaid. But that's irrelevant.
> Are you sure that the reality around patient drug experiences is so positive?
Well yes, by definition. Generally, and simply put, a drug can't enter the market unless it's better than the current standard treatment.
Hundred years ago a simple infection could kill you, or result in a limb being amputated sans anesthesia. The difference between then and now is the work of research and pharma companies.
I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems. What I learned of the dishonesty in the industry made me decide to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency and I have no other choice. The FDA is a revolving door of pharma execs with financial incentives so they can’t be trusted either.
> I worked in pharma for a few years on clinical trial systems
Same here. What did you see that didn't make you lose trust?
What I saw if anything was the rigorous work required to get a drug on the market. FDA inspections were feared because if you've made mistakes in your trial everything risks going to the trash.
> to only take anything they produce if it’s an extreme emergency
How high would you toddler's fever or painful your tooth ache have to be for it to be an extreme emergency, before you administer some paracetamol? What about anxiety? What about illnesses your ageing parents may have? There's a very large gap between comfort and near-death.
Lying was absolutely commonplace about anything, software validation testing included. Our company 'managed' their relationships with the FDA so we didn't have to fear them, so bribery basically. When I worked there, it was less than a decade since all the rules regarding bribing doctors had changed, so there was still a lot of that going on. All expenses paid trip to Hawaii for doctors and PI's for a week to optionally attend your 2 hour talk on a new drug, that kind of thing. Golf was a big carrot that was used. This was in an area that was a pharma co. hub geographically, so most people had worked at the other companies and all knew each other as well the the FDA people and this helped to grease the wheels. Our company did most of their trials in India, where it's apparently legal to do things to humans with drugs and therapies you can't get away with in the states, so we really leaned into that. Might not have been legal, but it's what was happening anyway.
I don't force my own preferences on my family. I'd not go to a doctor complaining of pain again - they're in over-correction mode over killing so many people with opiates that you can't get help with that for the time being. I'd never personally take any of the medication peddled for anxiety - too many of those meds don't have long term studies or the AE's were swept under the rug for approval.
>However, this theory was circulated and promoted to inspire hatred and distrust of many authority figures.
Don't forget that some people just want to know the truth, and don't like being lied to. I don't think it's a good principle that whenever the truth is used as an excuse for bad things (insofar as "distrust of authority figures" is even a bad thing), it is justified to lie.
>Even today we're still seeing thousands die from what may very well be a conspiracy theory.
And how many past and future deaths can be attributed to the lack of trust caused by trying to cover up the truth? Many more, I'd wager. There's a crucial irony in trying to maintain trust by hiding the truth. Many people just can't or don't want to understand this.
> There was a brief window at the beginning where it would have mattered to know the origin of the virus.
This is such a fatalistic and cynical way of looking at the world. It mattered then -- as it matters now -- because we can act on information. Everything that happened after that "window" was not overdetermined.
To me fair the folk dying today are tangential to the origin story.
I'm not sure the origin story mattered a whole lot along the way, other than being a useful political distraction. I don't think it informed personal or medical behaviour.
Of course discussions around vaccines, masks, social distancing etc did have a huge impact on personal behaviours, so those are far more impactful both than and in hindsight.
The different strategies applied, the messaging, the outcomes, from New Zealand to Sweden and everything in-between will be disected by anthropogists for decades to come.
The actual origin is a red-herring, it really doesn't matter. Viruses come from lots of places. We can't prevent that. What we can control is our response. As long as our first question is "who to blame" our outcomes will be similar, or worse, the next time around.
Absolutely. Perhaps it was grown in a lab, perhaps it was released, or perhaps it escaped. All happened before, all will happen again.
Given that I don't think we -can- control human behavior, there are good labs, there are bad labs, etc, I think the ability to -respond- I paramount. While the origin is interesting in an historical way, lessons from the response will be more useful going forwards.
We need to respond in a way that is independent of origin. That will ultimately lead to better outcomes, and incidentally reduce the risk of bio-terrorism.
[Aside - if it was lab grown I don't think it was released on purpose (it wouldn't have been released locally). Which means some sort of failure in the safety protocols, which likely means human error. General discussion on that topic I useless except for a tiny sliver of people doing that work. I'm not sure discussing it on social media really achieves anything. ]
Well if it did come from a lab, there is the obvious question of whether the type of research that lab was doing had benefits commensurate with the risks, and also whether the middle of a dense city is the best place to conduct that kind of research.
The origin story matters because we had the authoritarian bureaucrats who helped create the virus AND LIED ABOUT IT running the virus response in this country and they took all of their new powers and produced one of the highest per capita death rates from the virus in a so-called advanced country.
You don't say which country is "this country" - but from the context I'm assuming China? And sure if it was created in a lab then that opens the door to lots of political questions.
But the source of the virus remains less important to the folk that died from it. They're no less dead because it escaped from a lab than if it came from a wet market.
Responses in every country were different. Which ones were the right ones are valuable lessons moving forward, and anthropologists will be studying that data for decades.
I think OP meant the US. Anthony Fauci was one of the main individuals in the government responsible for sponsoring gain of function research, including funding some of it at the Wuhan institute. It was incredibly odd that a virologist with no public health background (and a very questionable role in past HIV policy) effectively commandeered the CDC's job here, but it makes sense if you think about it as a " cover my ass" move from him.
The origin 100% does matter. It demonstrates that some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly. That seems relevant, especially when simultaneously Covid demonstrated that such research is also really important to do. Like the origin actually does pose some serious, non-trivial ethical questions about disease research that the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.
>> some kinds of virus research pose an existential threat to humanity if not handled properly.
I mean, I'm not trying to be a dick, but ... duh. This has been the primary plot point of a zillion movies for forever.
Oh, and accidents at labs happen more often than you'd like[1].
And the frequency seems to be going up, not down.
>> the public absolutely has a right and obligation to participate in.
I'm sure the "public" (by which I assume you mean random people on social media) are not qualified in the slightest to participate in this discussion. If you feel that you have an "obligation" to weigh in, then by all means feel free. No-one is stopping you. It's completely possible to have discussions on lab safety without having to point fingers at a specific incident.
As you point out there's a really strong tension at play here - it's very important to be able to do virus research. Working with viruses is dangerous. It can be made as safe as possible, but it's still dangerous. There is a very fine line here, which is best walked by people highly qualified and working in this space. Given they are the most likely first victims of any accident, I'm sure they are highly motivated to be safe.
Perhaps it matters so that we can hold those responsible to account to reduce the chances of it happening again? Wouldn't you want to know if a rogue group had a gain-of-function project rejected by DARPA and then secretly moved it to China to avoid oversight and then that project caused a pandemic?
And perhaps the people that did that shouldn't be in charge of how to handle the pandemic and shouldn't be in charge of determining how the pandemic started?
Matters to me. If it was made in a lab I want to know how it will prevented next time and if it can’t be prevented I want that type of research stopped.
It's very arrogant to take your understanding of the benefit of the truth, finding it lacking, and then assuming that this is same negligible benefit the truth will have for everyone else.
With some of these controversial topics, there always seem to be people who prefer disinformation over truth for the reason that the general public can't be trusted with the truth since it might motivate them to do bad things.
The question then is, does it apply to yourself, or are you special? What knowledge motivates you to do bad things? Do you wish that was hidden from you so you weren't such a harmful person?
There are folks who were speaking out early despite harsh criticism. RFK JR (who happens to be running for president on the democratic ticket in the US) has another book coming out soon that will likely be very thoroughly researched around this topic.
> We’re building a community of doctors and patients affected by medical tyranny. Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.
> Our goal is to rebuild the sacred trust between the medical community and those they serve.
Sure but looking at just one of the GHP people (Molly Rutherford) shows a Twitter timeline promoting conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers, Epoch Times, anti-LGBTQ, etc. It doesn't engender much confidence in her reliability as a narrator.
> I'd like for someone to throughly research and write about how it became taboo to discuss the virus leak theory. How researchers who discussed it were shunned (...) and in some cases had their posts banned from Social Media.
I would like exactly the same about anti-vaxxers but excluding those people who are against any other vax. Anti-covid-vaxxers in other words. Covid is not a pox and all the strict measures were happened just because our digital world just allows such a blatant declassification of freedom people. Compare the peak number of deaths from Covid with the average deaths from alcohol and you realize that this is just a normal year. BTW mass deaths from non-violent reasons is not something totally bad in obviously overpopulated world. And I do not see much discussions about who sets the borders to our government's behavior in such a situations.
The good news is that everything else the US government suppressed really was outrageous lies that are only supported by racists, like the mRNA vaccines being completely ineffective and often fatal.
How did it become taboo to discuss biological sex, race, the effects of migration on society and other topics in democratic, liberal countries?
How did it become taboo to discuss the pros and cons of a specific vaccine or the complex geopolitical background of the Russo-Ukrainian war?
An ad-hoc coalition of political parties, NGOs, activists and journalists has hijacked public discourse, are manufacturing an official narrative and selling it as as unassailable truth while bullying and mobbing any dissenters.
When did people start conflating people disagreeing vehemently with them and censorship/suppression?
I've been called a moron for saying that I don't think the evidence is fully there yet for lab leak, does that make me a victim of a counter-censorship?
I can't speak for "people", but I can speak for myself as the grandparent comment, and I take no issue with disagreement. It's how the disagreement is expressed. Using words like "conspiracy theory" and "disinformation" are the keywords to justify censorship/suppression (see Hunter Biden laptop. See lab-leak theory).
No excuse for the Hunter Biden thing, but lab-leak theory has been covered quite extensively in the media & discussed all over the place since the start and hard for me to really see ivermectin stuff in any light other than conspiracy theory, you are theorizing that there is some very effective drug against Covid that others are 'conspiring' to prevent you from having.
No, that right there is how I remind you that if you want your hypothesis to be taken seriously you need proofs or at least a very compelling argument. There was neither.
Nonsense. There were plenty of arguments from the very beginning for the lab leak theory. The alternative "bat cave" hypothesis had plenty of implausiblies (e.g. huge distance) and was far from being "proven".
There is, however, quite a bit of precedent for bat coronaviruses eventually infecting humans, most likely through zoonotic spillover via an intermediate species (e.g. HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV, SADS-CoV), and thanks to humans shipping animals all over the globe, huge distances aren't necessarily a deal breaker.
The difference between previous spillovers like SARS1 and MERS was these viruses rapidly mutated as they adapted towards humans allowing for the identification of the intermediate species within months. SARS2 on the other hand was already pre-adapted towards humans, had almost no adaptive mutations and no intermediate host has been found. And guess what when a virus crosses into humans the virus does not suddenly go extinct in the intermediate species, it continues to circulate, for example we still to this day find camels infected with MERS. But SARS2 we just can't seem to find this progenitor virus circulating.. . . very strange isn't it?
As far as I'm aware, we still do not know the first intermediate species of SARS-1 (cf Wikipedia: "Infected palm civets at the market were traced to farms where no infected animals were found. It is unknown whether the virus was originally introduced to the market by civets, humans, or another animal." and "Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.") So no, it hasn't been months, but 20 years...
The palm civet found infected in the market was infected with a virus 99.9% similar but unique to palm civets. The issue here is they have found animals infected with an ancestral strain at a market that's a 29-nucleotide difference. SARS2 none of this has been found, which stands in stark contrast to all previous coronavirus spillovers.
And the fact the virus not only was extremely well adapted towards humans, but also is more adapted towards human's than other species. Nothing about SARS-2 is typical.
I mean I get it, lots of people's careers/reputations are on the line so it's hard to accept, but it is vital we do.
The same kind of arguments as for the bat cave theory.
Anyway, your argument here seems circular: Academics must not take the lab leak theory seriously, because only non-academics discuss it, because academics don't take the lab leak theory seriously.
I didn't say non-academic, I explicitly said "crazy people".
The lab theory will be taken seriously when there will be serious evidences. If they exist they will come out. Believing in conspiracies because enough people believe in them without any actual, tangible, verifiable evidence is worrying.
The option "intensive farming+poverty+open market full of crap+random bats, all in extremely unsanitary conditions" seems a way better theory, needing way less evidence (also hard to acquire in this case), if you compare it to the random lab doing experiments full of incompetent researchers.
Well it's not my hypothesis, it's a hypothesis of which the Director of National Intelligence in the United States during the pandemic, the executive head of our intelligence community, stated to congress under oath:
"My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense."
Say what you will about politics and intentions, my statement holds that joining the group that calls people "crazy" and "conspiracy losers" is not a form of healthy discussion, in fact, is a form of propaganda itself.
Not all of the early lab-leak voices were racist. Some people went for that conclusion because of the proximity of the outbreak to the Wuhan lab which was researching that sort of virus. They may have been a little quick to do so but they guessed right. It wasn't that big of a leap, and it wasn't anti-Chinese to think that, just sort of obvious. I know that because I felt that way at the time. And then there were the Tucker Carlsons who called it the "Chinese coronavirus" and all that, and you're probably right about them.
> Not all of the early lab-leak voices were racist.
That sort of statement is always true, but that doesn't negate the real dangers of the Right using it for political advantage. Their general approach is to drive a wedge between different groups in the US (and abroad), pit them against each other, and have them take out their rage on each other as a means to distract them from the real issues going on. It was clear at the time that the Trump administration wasn't after "the truth" but more after a way to keep people occupied - and if that puts a lot of people in danger, they don't really care.
And before anyone tries to defend the Right, take a look at these basekless attacks on drag queens. Meanwhile we have school shootings happening all the time and they don't do anything about it. It's a big shame because the a large portion of the USA isn't about trying to make things better - they just want to rage and cause damage towards others.
It's not about what you believe, it's WHY do you believe it.
It's better to start with logic, reason, and scientific evidence - not with guesses, fear, or conspiracy theories.
Sometimes the conspiracy theories are true!! The US government DID test mind control and psychadelic drugs on people. They DID forcibly sterilize thousands of african americans. But was 9/11 an inside job? Doesn't seem like it.
Don't forget, most of the same people screaming Lab Leak were later screaming Horse Worm Medicine.
>Don't forget, most of the same people screaming Lab Leak were later screaming Horse Worm Medicine.
So what? You just said we should only look at "logic, reason, and scientific evidence". What some of the same people are screaming shouldn't be a factor at all, by your own reasoning.
At the beginning they were screaming Lab Leak, and the rest of us looked at the evidence and said "Well, yes, that's certainly suspicious and should be investigated. But we don't have evidence for it yet, so the reasonable thing to do would be to wait and see." And the Lab Leakers screamed "NO, it was CHINA, don't you see? We need to put tariffs on them!". And we said "uh huh. OK. Yes, your certainty that it's China doesn't make it more logical."
And then later, when new evidence came in we said "Huh. OK. Well that's interesting. That's definitely more likely now. OK"
Anytime anyone starts talking about left or right in a scientific discussion I instantly discount the rest of their view, because we aren't talking about science anymore. Nothing is gained from making this discussion part of that asinine tribal tug of war.
You ignore the tribal tug of war at your own peril.
You become a useful idiot to those that would manipulate science for their own needs.
In a broader sense, when one side wants to make change, and one doesn't, the "centrist" position benefits the side that doesn't want to make progress.
The scientific reality is that at this point in the pandemic cycle, the best evidence now suggests credibility to the lab leak theory. In 2020 it did not.
What the heck are you writing about, this was discussed in all mainstream media I ever cared to look at, since almost beginning of lockdowns. Maybe you watch some strange subset of those?
Sure, the overall narrative was that this is just an unproven theory and nothing more, but it was out there, people were discussing probabilities of some lab employees error who went to nearby wet market afterwards.
I am not saying this didn't happen in scientific community, I don't follow them closely enough to claim that. I recall few cases in Europe where paranoid scientists were claiming this, on top of quite a few other crank theories about various topics, also ie pushing hard for high doses of Ivermectin, dismissing all vaccinations etc. Understandably, with just throwing around various claims without backing them up with facts, they were not received well in community.
Tech companies too had a role to play here. For the sake of free speech, what happened here is worth discussing.