First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground".
My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".
There's a real possibility that a gain-of-function experiment created SARS-CoV-2:
"Lipsitch’s activists (calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group) sent around a strong statement on the perils of research with “Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” signed by more than a hundred scientists. The work might “trigger outbreaks that would be difficult or impossible to control,” the signers said. Fauci reconsidered, and the White House in 2014 announced that there would be a “pause” in the funding of new influenza, SARS, and MERS gain-of-function research." [0]
In December 2017, the US began funding gain-of-function research on these deadly diseases again. This research creates deadly diseases that may not have existed otherwise.
This pandemic has been enough for me to strongly believe that there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria. I'd like to help prevent a future pandemic, and that's one clear way we can help.
Although I am there with you in spirit, a global ban is effectively meaningless.
It is unenforceable from the start. All the major world powers would continue their research (perhaps slightly less openly) simply from a MAD angle (it is irresponsible to ignore the value of a pathogen that no one else has seen and you have the antibiotics for).
We are living in dark times in terms of our technological capability and the aggressiveness of state actors.
I would argue that the only chance we have is to reign in the behaviours of our states. Crazy and seemingly impossible, but stopping science/tech is far beyond reach.
There are very strong controls on experiments on humans, for example, and they seem to work, for the most part. Governments may circumvent them in secret, but when it's found out people were experimented on, there's a scandal.
So, while it may not be 100% foolproof, it would be quite meaningful.
Most of the gain of function research is either well meaning to understand disease or part of normal science published in journals. Banning it would reduce the amount done greatly.
Even if these researchers have good intentions, they're human, and humans make mistakes. If someone doing gain-of-function research lets a new deadly virus or bacteria out into the wild by mistake, their mistake can can cause a pandemic like the one we're currently suffering from.
I don't think there's anything that we could learn from gain-of-function research on deadly viruses and bacteria that would be worth risking millions of deaths.
To be clear, I would guess that if SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab in Wuhan, it was created with good intentions, and escaped from the lab by mistake. And rather than figuring out where to point fingers, we can work together to prevent future pandemics by preventing research that creates deadly diseases.
>Most of the gain of function research is either well meaning
It doesn't matter how good your intentions are when your behavior is extremely dangerous and can (and possibly did) result in a global pandemic that kills millions of people. Risk/reward calculations should be performed without regard to intent.
>Banning it would reduce the amount done greatly.
It would also reduce the risk of a man-made virus killing millions of people.
It is an absolutely braindead thing for a nuclear power to do - bio/chem weapon R&D. The reason why the US abandoned that course so long ago had nothing to do with morality - somebody in the DoD simply realized that they were furthering the state of the art in dirt cheap WMDs. If you already have nukes, you want to keep the cost of doomsday devices as high as possible - limiting the number of potential rivals.
> The reason why the US abandoned that course so long ago had nothing to do with morality - somebody in the DoD simply realized that they were furthering the state of the art in dirt cheap WMDs
Is there a reliable reference that the US is no longer researching biochemical weapons?
Wikipedia claims: "Both the U.S. bio-weapons ban and the Biological Weapons Convention restricted any work in the area of biological warfare to defensive in nature. In reality, this gives BWC member-states wide latitude to conduct biological weapons research because the BWC contains no provisions for monitoring or enforcement.[74][75] The treaty, essentially, is a gentlemen's agreement amongst members backed by the long-prevailing thought that biological warfare should not be used in battle.[74]"
The very public shuttering of facilities, the absence of military doctrine, etc. Yes, there could be secret congressional funding for a secret research lab serving a secret component of the military that secretly maintains readiness to do something that is strategically counterproductive and categorically denied. Do I really need to go on with how silly that line of thought is?
I really don’t understand how anyone can have such a profound level of trust in organisations that have proved themselves utterly unworthy of that trust. Have the lessons of Snowden really been forgotten this quickly??
Well that is a major mischaracterization of my views on the US government. It is funny that you mention Snowden, because many of us were called paranoid conspiracy nuts for using the exact same logic I just demonstrated to warn about dragnet surveillance programs. Watch: the USG has the disposition to spy on its citizens and the capability to do so without fear of consequences, therefor it is almost certainly happening. You can see that argument commonly popping up all over the 90s cypherpunks mailing list.
Now, try to apply that same reasoning to your allegation without looking silly. Yes, the USG has secretly run certain aspects of a public biowarfare program - and when it came to light they paid. Boom, they couldn't keep it secret and they couldn't escape the consequences (lots of very damaging legal cases and hearings). Finally, do they have an incentive? No - as I said, it makes no sense for them to reduce the cost of yet another world ending weapon. Now you could point to Russia getting caught with massive stockpiles of Anthrax after they claimed to end the program... but their nuclear program's credibility isn't comparable - they've always demonstrated clear signs of insecurity about it. That isn't the case for the USG.
> It is also much easier to stop bad software than bad biology. Software is much simpler than the human body.
As an RE geek, and a biologist, the Movies were so f'ing awful... I'm playing the new reboot of the Outbreak series, my favorite of all, RE: Resistance and its pretty awesome and still does way more with genre of survival horror in what was simply an add-on DLC cash-in to sell an updated RE3 then all the horrible movies combined. Online play was always more fun, but now that you're the villainous 'master mind' behind the plot kill the subjects for your own gain is absolutely brilliant, something sorely lacking the same Raccoon City Outbreak universe.
They simply did what Hollywood always does: make shit up and refused to speak about the Cyberpunk-esque undertones of Umbrella and the T virus in any adequate way. This works for comic book stuff because it's audience is so self-serving, but it's also why it's so boring and suffers from the repeated one dimensional story telling.
Instead of following the manga-style adaptions they have in Japanese cinema Hollywood made a series of mindless 2 hour brain drains of of zombie shooting banality, and then made up characters the main character (Jovovich) doesn't even exist in the lore, they deviated so far from the plot that they even managed to get Jill's character so bad I literately pissed of my date when we went I was nerd-raging so hard about how bad it was and how much a missed opportunity it was to inspire more like me to enter into biology--we were both freshman in University and I was at my peak of biopunk naivety and advocacy.
The animated series were way better, as is the case with Batman stuff and shows how gritty and dire these subjects are when properly told from the right platform and setting.
As for COVID, I witnessed how resurgance of the yellow movement in HK was being quelled by the CCP and PLA since that Summer, and I personally feel the theory that an accidental leaked gain of function virus makes sense but that nothing 'damning' will ever be uncovered as the floods that impacted Wuhan provided perfect cover to do any successful form of epidemiology, the wet markets are no longer a source of valid data and it was clear how the WHO who were refused at first from entering) is not to be trusted given their alliances to the CCP and refusal to acknowledge the efforts Taiwan had during this pandemic.
Sadly, political theater will always undo anything Science can prove (or not prove) even when it results in the death of 2+ million people. Let it not be forgotten the CCP was jailing, disspeaing and going fafter people on Social media for talking about the deadliness and serious nature of what was happening. Mainland Citizen-journalists who exposed the dire situation and the pathetic state of these make shift hospitals over run by are still not accounted for and are presumed to be either dissapeared in a black-site re-education camp, or simply murdered at this point.
That's why the CCP is such a threat, and its reliance needs to be broken from and decoupled: cheap labour and trinkets aren't worth having them be the vanguard for Human or even environmental health and denying and hiding, getting rid of any and all evidence when it suits them--which includes but is not limited to disspearing people and committing war crimes and acts of genocide while Xi speaks at DAVOS about creating a more 'diverse' system as it extinguishes ethnic groups it see's as threat to it's divisive death cult (CCP).
I'm definitely no expert but it seems to me that the sheer number of biological variables means that even if you know something could potentially get bad it wouldn't really give you much of a head start as any vaccine you might develop is not so likely to be viable. Testing the impact on living organisms would also have so many ethical issues as to be pretty much a non starter.
I'd genuinely like to know what we would get out of it that would warrant such risk taking?
There was some considerable progress recently using AI to predict possible mutations. I wish I could find the link. That seems like a better way to go.
You can if you want to show really great efficacy results to the regulators, just omit that pesky control group. Buy my tiger repelling rock, prevents 100% of tiger attacks.
Similarly smallpox has been completely eradicated, but USA and Russia like to keep around a few live samples, "for research". Whatever will wipe us all out in the end, we probably had it coming.
It’s substantially more complicated than that smallpox samples keep turning up in the US [1][2]. Who knows how many samples were lost in the chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union. Smallpox was in every country on earth until relatively recently simply destroying samples isn’t enough. Hanging onto them in case we need a new vaccine is absolutely prudent.
That certainly doesn't preclude research that's useful (and essential) to developing new pathogens; all of these things are by nature dual-use technologies.
there should be a global ban on gain-of-function experiments on deadly viruses and bacteria.
Would you make the same argument for software vulnerability research? I think the arguments against both are the same, and with the same result: white-hat researchers will halt their work, leaving more of the field available to black-hat researcers.
Maybe so but i would assume the barrier to entry for creating a synthetic pathogen is likely to be much higher than somebody tinkering with a Kali Linux VM. I dont know much about gain of function experiments and limited working infosec knowledge so take that with a grain of salt.
A failed experiment? Maybe a bit more likely, but still I don't think so
Sars-Cov-2 looks like pretty much what it is: a zoonotic virus that "doesn't know what's going on"
Hence why only the recent mutations made its transmission more efficient.
Now, if it escaped unbeknownst from a research lab, that I would put on the plausible category. Would be more possible if it wouldn't have had a perfect virus breeding ground right next to it.
How about this possibility: (1) You've got this lab that uses a lot of animals and does experiments. (2) There is a 'wet' market nearby that deals in animals from A to Z. (3) Maybe some animal from the lab carrying a zoonotic virus (origin unknown) somehow got disposed of for cash in the market? How could WHO or anyone uncover such an occurrence a year or more later? Would it be possible that such a thing had happened and no one ever had had any idea that it had happened?
Or maybe it was in humans a bit before it took off. I see Daszak's kind of changed his tune a bit these days to not mention anything like that lab stuff.
I mean stability in that the sequence of the virus is much the same as it was a month before. That's not true when a virus jumps species - they evolve rapidly to the new species.
I just assume the ccp default mode is to cover up, even when there is nothing to cover up. When legitimacy derives from competence rather than from election, you better never have any high profile incompetence.
This is the kind of behavior you see in organizations where the penalty for making mistakes is overly severe, the only recourse for people is to lie and cover-up the truth at all costs. This is how projects at some companies continue despite being way behind schedule and overbudget until eventually the weight of the truth brings everything crashing down.
The old story of the Chinese general Chen Shen comes to mind:
Apparently he was running late due to rainstorms and the penalty for appearing this late to the Qin emperor was execution. Since that’s the same penalty for open rebellion, he decided he might as well try that too. And that was the beginning of the end of the Qin dynasty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_Wu_Guang_uprising
If the penalty for lying and being caught is the same league as screwing up, people are going to cover up problems.
The English idiom for this is "I'd rather be hanged for a sheep than a lamb."
That is to say, if the punishment for any kind of crime is death, no matter how serious or how trivial, you might as well go ahead and commit the much more serious one and try and cover that up instead.
Everybody will always have a motive to prevent others from discovering their failures. A democratically elected politician has just as much reason to want their failures covered up as a CCP member does. The reason governments like the CCP have such a hard time dealing with that issue is that their entire system is set up so that you have one party, with no opposition, all working in concert to conceal the truth from the people. The “voters” have no mechanism to scrutinize their government, and no alternative to “vote” for if they don’t like what they’re doing. A natural consequence of this is that the opacity the CCP relies on to protect itself from scrutiny, also prevents central committee members from being able to effectively scrutinize the system themselves. A good story is always made available for public consumption, but what’s known internally is equally controlled by individual political actors trying to protect their own interests.
This is also why dictatorship always have corruption. They cannot have transparency which means there will be corruption.
Of course democracies are just as vulnerable to all the bad stuff as they are run by humans, but transparency is at least possible. Sadly we see national security being used as reason to avoid transparency, and of course corruption follows.
Any organisation, or group, or person who’s granted any power will tend towards trying to accumulate more power. So while your comment is a bit hyperbolic, it’s true of the US government in the same way it’s true of every other government. For any grossly authoritarian policy you see the US government implement, you’ll typically find equivalent policies in Canada and the EU and the UK and Australia...
It’s not a new thing. The (paraphrased) quote “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance” is at least a couple hundred of years old. In practice however it’s not a very simple proposition at all. People typically agree with endlessly granting government additional powers when it’s for a policy they agree with.
The difference between the US (or France, or Germany, or the UK...) and China however, is that we actually have some mechanisms for holding our government to account (however flawed they might be). Whereas Chinese citizens have none at all.
It’s how all centrally planned systems work. Avoiding accountability for failure is always the most optimal strategy, which inevitably ends up involving concealing failure. It was one of the defining characteristics of the soviet system. You can even see it play out in large companies (which essentially operate as miniature planned economies), where political actors promote bad ideas, and then somehow end up rewarded after they fail. The only difference being that companies in a free market (usually) have to suffer the consequences of their failures, and politicians in a democratic system can (usually) be replaced if they fall out of favor.
You're being down-voted but this is exactly what my friends who live in China have told me. People were also downvoting big time back in March when I and others were saying that the numbers China was quoting were made the heck up. Suddenly the western media realizes that's true[1] yet we don't see a mass back-lash against China as a result...
"Chinese friends/wife/coworker said" is particularly kind of ridiculous appeal to authority considering the average citizen is not typically a subject matter expert on relevant topics being discussed outside of generalized familiarity with the censorship apparatus. The only useful things the average Chinese person will tell you is Chinese numbers / stats with Chinese characteristics are not accurate, but analysts familiar with Chinese stats will at least use oblique indicators to tell you if numbers are useful, i.e. Chinese GDP smoothing.
Or in this case, how covid19 export case numbers from places like Taiwan, HK, SK, Singapore, Australia, Newzealand all indicate Chinese numbers are not grossly exaggerated - China only exported a fraction of covid19 cases compared to Europe or North America because covid19 never exploded in China due to harsh restrictions. The article you're citing is also sourcing figures from _Chinese_ CDC on antibody prevalence rate which is expected to be higher than pure testing data seen in similar studies in other countries. So again, it's official Chinese numbers being useful and comporting to similar measures elsewhere. The difference is western media like BBC attempting to spin as the numbers being uniquely nefarious and useful idiots eating it up, just like in this NYT article.
I turned into a jaded citizen. When first reports from China emerged, and we saw how the CCP was dragging people out of their homes over a ‘flu.’ I knew something was very, very wrong. I told my parents and immediate family to secure provisions for at least 3 months and to prepare for a time to not leave the house at all until c19 passes.
Then, nothing happened. Not one country stopped their domestic travel, no one prepared and mandated a ‘3 month summer staycation’ (my poor attempt at marketing a terrible circumstance with some positive spin)... and we all started blaming each other.
That was sickening to me... it’s bad enough when we don’t take the proper action to protect our fellow neighbor, but even after acknowledging the cause is basically lost, we turn on each other.
So my quip was in that jaded poor taste, when I saw the finger pointing beginning again... and I should have just commented this to begin with...
Down votes or up votes don't matter to me - I'm just glad (and surprised) that what I thought was basically an innocuous "IMO" comment generated so much discourse.
Isn't this the point of public forums? To encourage discussion?
Although disagree with almost everything about trump, I think he was in some way right about China. I don’t think it has anything to do with the Chinese people though.
Also, I don’t think he went about it in an effective way at all, it seems like the ccp was betting on him just going away after a while and just suffering the pain for a while.
What you mention deserves to be repeated. The chinese people and the CCP are not the same thing, just as the national security apparatus of the US... and US citizens are separate too.
its natural to catch flak, but it happens to both sides.
The saudi arabia govt is friendly to our govt, but the vast majority of their population thinks its totally OK to blow up US citizens.
Iranian leadership is constantly at odds with the US military leadershp, but iranians themselves welcome tourists from the US with open arms , love US culture and movies, and want americans to visit.
The CCP consists of 90M+ party members who represent all facets of society--larger than entire population of Germany. Include family members and it's 300M+ almost size of US.
Furthermore, it's an integral part of Chinese society with overwhelming support among its citizens (>90%). The CCP is continuation of past dynasties operating under the 'Mandate of Heaven' to serve the people. Failure to do so and it will be replaced.
So no, this often repeated fallacy by the west that they condemn CCP not the Chinese people is not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending in assuming 1.4B are somehow mindless robots at the mercy of the few.
Demonizing the CCP, is in effect, directly insulting the Chinese people.
They are not mindless robots. They are doing the best the can living in a totalitarian state operating the most sophisticated internal surveillance ever.
How can you claim they the CCP has support with a straight face? First, says who? CCP-controlled media? Second, would the average Chinese person answer honestly? Third, the Chinese have never experienced real democracy. Asking them if they support the CCP is meaningless. It’s like asking a third-gen Red Sox fan if they support the Rex Sox.
Why would a totalitarian state allow 150M+ of its citizens to travel abroad annually pre-covid to experience 'democracy/freedom' yet despite doing so they overwhelmingly returned to their supposedly oppressive country.
As for 'real democracy' no country has it least of all the US which more accurately an oligarchic plutocracy with power held by select few/wealthy(ie top 1%).
Ultimately, they are sufficiently confident in their indoctrination that they are unafraid that exposure to other ideologies will lead to a rejection of their own. Where they are not confident, they do limit travel. See their cancellation of passports for Hong Kongers.
I will not respond to your whataboutism argument as it is beside my point.
The govt is confident that most citizens will see the downsides of democracy and how it leads to much social divisiveness and govt dysfunction as evidenced by the US.
HKrs fomenting riots/violence and breaking the law have rightfully had their passports confiscated to face consequences of their actions.
The CCP is an institution. Your argument implies that belonging to an institution means agreeing 100% with every single decision of the institution.
As, an example, imagine we are talking about a specific action Google took. While you could argue that all Google employees have some kind of responsibility in action s the company takes, would you argue that the millions of the company employees agree with every decision the institution takes?
One can be offended for anything. I fail to see what is arrogant or condescending about criticising an institution (even if millions of people belong to it).
P.S. I am ignoring the dynamics/incentives of being a member of an institution, which could be many more than agreeing with everything the institution does or say.
No, the CCP is the governing body of China which is a sovereign entity. CCP contains multiple factions representing all facets of society hence 90M+ membership who do not all agree and have agendas.
What distinguishes CCP from western governments is that party membership and advancement is based on meritocracy not populism resulting in only the most qualified/accomplished rising to positions of leadership.
> What distinguishes CCP from western governments is that party membership and advancement is based on meritocracy not populism
What makes the CCP like the West, though it's different in other ways, is that advancement in the CCP is based largely on the convenience of your views and actions to the established elites, which is only “meritocracy” to the extent that “advancing the interests of the established elites” is “merit”.
No, the meritocracy is actually defined by performance/KPIs which determine advancement. For example all party members must first pass 2 tests before acceptance as members than work at local rural level to advance from there.
There is no concept of 'established elites' because even the poorest can rise to top as President Xi has.
I'm sure a lot of Chinese are not fans even if they are forced to join by practical considerations. Like most communist systems they are unable to have democratic elections because people would vote them out.
In a country of 1.4B not everyone is going to agree which is evident in US w/only 1/4 of population. Chinese are free to immigrate elsewhere if the choose to do so.
Chinese citizens elect leaders at local level who in turn elect those above them and this continues to the highest levers where only the most competent rise to the top.
Communism is a misnomer when applied to China. It is no more communist than US is a democracy. In fact in many ways China is more democratic than US whereby it's govt of 90M+ members more accurately represent interests of Chinese society.
No need for you to preach to the choir about not trusting the Chinese government. As can be seen in the thread, people would much prefer to trust conspiracy theorists and fringe scientists before they put any trust in the Chinese government.
To me, the only constructive discussion that can be had at this point needs to be around actual evidence, and not the absence of it. The first documented cases, first traces of positive samples etc etc. It's clearly still in the early stages of discoveries so all theories are just theories. That said I don't expect this to remain a mystery forever. It will just take time, because eventually the natural origins will be pinned down and reasonable chain of events of first spread will be identified.
We’re just not following a good process of discerning truth here. We started with a blatant, baseless conspiracy theory “this is a weapon China created”. Then we white wash the theory to “China created it, but maybe it was an accident”. Then suddenly the burden of truth is on China to disprove this claim. It’s just not a sensible process, rooted in the fallacy of the middle ground; as you said we need to start from the evidence and not from what you want to be true.
While from a US political perspective, it may appear that the lab leak hypothesis began with the conspiracy theory that China created a weapon, this is not the dominant perspective among scientists who have expressed doubt publicly (and privately).
Our prior is that novel viruses come from zoonotic sources. We haven't ever experienced a pandemic derived from a laboratory leak. It seems fanciful, because it would be unprecedented. But, what would it look like if it did happen? How would it be any different than what we've seen?
Given the situation, yes, we cannot make any conclusions without evidence. And this implies a burden of proof on governments. The fact that this outbreak began in China is unfortunate, but it does not make it right for them to withhold information on the origins of the virus. They should share every scrap of information and evidence that they have, or expect exactly the kind of reaction that you are critiquing.
There is no fallacy of middle ground here. There is simply a lack of hard evidence to confirm a particular hypothesis about where this virus came from. And, there is an uncomfortable abundance of circumstantial evidence pointing in a highly unusual direction. This is not an issue that you can align with the US political spectrum. And it can be approached without needing to make any claims about how good or bad the Chinese government is. You cannot claim to know what this virus is without information that is not available.
Claims that it is zoonotic are unfortunately just as baseless as any conspiracy theories about weapon development that you've been hearing. The argument for zoonotic origin are based on a single piece of evidence that came out of the labs in the very city where the virus was first found: the sequence of a related SARS-like virus, and one with some very unusual sequence features and publication parameters. Doubt is reasonable. We should fully accept the possibility that humans were able to generate such a construct, and be ready for the next time it happens. The basic fact is that we know how to make such a virus, and that information is now out in the open whether or not this particular virus came from a lab.
I don't think many people believe "this is a weapon China created." It doesn't really make sense - it would be a rubbish weapon just killing the over 80s and why release it in your own country?
On the other hand asking if a bat type coronavirus could have come from the nearest place with lots of bat type coronavirus doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.
>No need for you to preach to the choir about not trusting the Chinese government. As can be seen in the thread,
Great expression! I have the same strange feeling but couldn't put in correct words. Other than the topic of this thread, there's a meta topic which reflects some interesting human natures showing up more often among politicians and lawyers: Spread bias opinions without being caught misleading, disguise subjective speculations under objective delicately organized articulation.
Being constructive in discussion is extremely difficult. Sometime I watch the debate with fun on meta topics other than topics.
Are you aware that the messed up situation with WHO funding is due to US policy?
“ Though the US paid $446.5m in 2019 compared with China’s $43m, the bulk of American funding was voluntary; the organization only receives 17% of its funding through “assessed” contributions, AKA country membership dues. The bulk of its budget is funded through voluntary donations, for which countries can earmark specific use, because President Ronald Reagan passed a “zero-growth policy” for WHO funding in the 1980s. With the assessed dues frozen at 1990s levels, the WHO has been forced to increasingly rely on donated funds.”
Note that the WHO has very similar problems to the International Red Cross: if they don't play by the rules of the governments in question, they get kicked out and can't do anything. Something is better than nothing, right?
On the other hand, the WHO after the pandemic had clearly emerged continued to appear biased, seriously damaging its reputation.
Epidemiology. History. The Spanish Flu was called that because at the time everyone (for xenophobic reasons... sound familiar?) blamed Spain. Today we can say with reasonable confidence that the source of the 1918 influenza epidemic was.... wait for it.....
People did not blame Spain for xenophobic reasons, just because the Spanish press was the first to report on it.
And, as pertains to the virus's origin, COVID-19 did come from China, and we know that. We have epidemiology to guide us here, and the situation is altogether different from 1918 w/r/t speed of communication and the state of science.
> People did not blame Spain for xenophobic reasons, just because the Spanish press was the first to report on it.
That doesn't disprove xenophobia at all. The Spanish press reported on it first because every nation involved in WWI very aggressively censored any mention of the flu. After the war, they had every incentive to play into people's natural xenophobia rather admit to covering up the disease. Here you see the Spanish Flu depicted as a flamenco lady:
Epidemiology and history wasn't as effective as you think in identifying the origins of The Spanish Flu. The origin being Kansas is only one of many plausible theories.
As far as I understand, it's called spanish flu because neutral Spain was free to report on the epidemic, while warring nations imposed heavy censorship for morale reasons, giving the false impression that Spain was especially hit.
It would be ironic if the thing was basically started by the US again with funding for "in vivo characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk". (https://grantome.com/grant/NIH/R01-AI110964-06)
>...The Spanish Flu was called that because at the time everyone (for xenophobic reasons... sound familiar?)
No, it tended to be called the Spanish Flu because Spanish newspapers simply reported more about the epidemic:
>...Spain was not involved in the war, having remained neutral, and had not imposed wartime censorship.[17][18] Newspapers were therefore free to report the epidemic's effects, such as the grave illness of King Alfonso XIII, and these widely-spread stories created a false impression of Spain as especially hard hit.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Kansas:
>...The first confirmed cases originated in the United States. Historian Alfred W. Crosby stated in 2003 that the flu originated in Kansas,[61] and popular author John M. Barry described a January 1918 outbreak in Haskell County, Kansas, as the point of origin in his 2004 article.
But then again:
>...A 2018 study of tissue slides and medical reports led by evolutionary biology professor Michael Worobey found evidence against the disease originating from Kansas, as those cases were milder and had fewer deaths compared to the infections in New York City in the same period. The study did find evidence through phylogenetic analyses that the virus likely had a North American origin, though it was not conclusive. In addition, the haemagglutinin glycoproteins of the virus suggest that it originated long before 1918, and other studies suggest that the reassortment of the H1N1 virus likely occurred in or around 1915.
Some theorize it might have first originated in Europe:
>...The major UK troop staging and hospital camp in Étaples in France has been theorized by virologist John Oxford as being at the center of the Spanish flu.[63] His study found that in late 1916 the Étaples camp was hit by the onset of a new disease with high mortality that caused symptoms similar to the flu.[64][63] According to Oxford, a similar outbreak occurred in March 1917 at army barracks in Aldershot,[65] and military pathologists later recognized these early outbreaks as the same disease as the Spanish flu.[66][63] The overcrowded camp and hospital at Etaples was an ideal environment for the spread of a respiratory virus.
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found evidence that the 1918 virus had been circulating in the European armies for months and possibly years before the 1918 pandemic.[67] Political scientist Andrew Price-Smith published data from the Austrian archives suggesting the influenza began in Austria in early 1917.
But then again:
>...A 2009 study in Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses found that Spanish flu mortality simultaneously peaked within the two-month period of October and November 1918 in all fourteen European countries analyzed, which is inconsistent with the pattern that researchers would expect if the virus had originated somewhere in Europe and then spread outwards.
Some theorize it was China:
>...In 1993, Claude Hannoun, the leading expert on the Spanish flu at the Pasteur Institute, asserted the precursor virus was likely to have come from China and then mutated in the United States near Boston and from there spread to Brest, France, Europe's battlefields, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world, with Allied soldiers and sailors as the main disseminators.[70] Hannoun considered several alternative hypotheses of origin, such as Spain, Kansas, and Brest, as being possible, but not likely.[70] In 2014, historian Mark Humphries argued that the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines might have been the source of the pandemic. Humphries, of the Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, based his conclusions on newly unearthed records. He found archival evidence that a respiratory illness that struck northern China (where the laborers came from) in November 1917 was identified a year later by Chinese health officials as identical to the Spanish flu.
On the other hand:
>...A report published in 2016 in the Journal of the Chinese Medical Association found no evidence that the 1918 virus was imported to Europe via Chinese and Southeast Asian soldiers and workers and instead found evidence of its circulation in Europe before the pandemic.
> No need for you to preach to the choir about not trusting the Chinese government
I am honestly laughing like this needs to be communicated to the HN folks, like it bares any insights, like it is not already the default political correctness for majority here.
The top comment is as useless as to say the OP would believe whatever he/she would love to believe whatever the evidence presented.
New Yorker puts it well:
"The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness"
Is it just me or is there a deep irony here? I find it interesting that one of the oft maligned attributes of religious communities, especially those in authority in said communities, is this same behavior. Do good things and be open, but also very much protect the brand. As a naive westerner I've hear/learned/assumed that Chinese communism/society was areligious.
When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abstractly, the Chinese Communist party is just the state religion.
I'm not trying to play a game of whataboutism. I'm curious why these structures seem to rise, regardless of what we intend or call the them. What is it about the human experience that so often results in this.
I apologize if this is overtly stereotypical, naive, assuming, or disrespectful. It wasn't meant to offend or annoy. Just cautiously curious.
The experience of changing from someone who believes all aspects of the “orthodoxy”, to someone who accepts that there are flaws in it, can be strikingly similar.
A Chinese friend once described to me the week he discovered YouTube after going to study in America, when for the first time he saw videos of Chinese leaders (2000-era) behaving very rudely toward reporters. He found that shocking, and over the next few weeks and more research, accepted that much of what he’d been taught about his history was fabrication. The experience was pretty traumatizing for him. He’s back living in China now, but with a very different perspective.
I was what you might call a fundamentalist Christian for most of my life, until I was exposed to enough of the counter-arguments that some of them finally stuck. The deprogramming process took a year and a half and was the most difficult thing I’ve ever done.
In both cases, the in-group is well-protected from “improper information” (as the CCP calls it). In China they have the great firewall and the domestic censorship apparatus; in religion believers are inoculated against trusting information from “worldly” sources (though the motives of those involved in the actual suppression may differ). Neither system could survive in its current form if this information weren’t suppressed — that’s obvious by looking at what happens when individuals are exposed to alternate points of view and take them seriously.
The great firewall is deterrent to spreading fake news, disinformation, and lies among the masses(1.4B) who make take it for truth resulting in social divisiveness and potential violence of which is happening in the US w/only 1/4 of the population.
That said, the firewall is easily bypassed with VPN by many with the means to do so. Chinese govt does not view this as contradiction with their policy as it is deemed those able to read Englis/foreign news are educated enough to discern the truth.
How can someone come on hackerNews (of all places) and claim the great firewall is a useful way to prevent disinformation? It just ensures that the only kind of information is the kind friendly to the ruling that party.
It insures that people aren't emotionally triggered by disinformation which often results in social divisiveness if not violence as is happening in the US.
Grew up in USSR. The basic premise of communism is that it's the best possible way to organize society. If you are not happy then it's not the problem with the communism(how could it be? it's the best!) but it's the problem with you. From that premise all sorts of bad things happen like you are not allowed to complain about communism or question it etc. Not unlike any authoritarian government or cult.
This is true of capitalist economic systems and democratic political systems. The USSR was not unusual in eliminating heterodox views, not that it was ever communist in more than name.
Criticizing such details are not the same as criticizing the system itself. Preferring one implementation of capitalism over another isn't a criticism of capitalism. Similarly, espousing one political party over another isn't criticism of democracy.
If you suggest eliminating private property to mitigate certain ills engendered by capitalism, or express another view that is truly antithetical to capitalism then you will find yourself marginalized to the point you cannot influence the system.
Are those articles suggesting how to fix capitalism or are they actually suggesting eliminating private ownership of the means of production? There are numerous example of the latter being crushed by, e.g. the CIA among others, for around a century. As for how they are marginalized, I'd challenge you to name a single instance of a capitalist state becoming anything else. There have been a few, e.g. China, USSR, PRK, Cuba, etc. which became state capitalism, but that's still a form of capitalism. The anarcho-syndaclists in Spain tried, but they were crushed by the state.
Private property is inextricably linked with capitalism. If there is no private property there can be no private ownership of the means of production, hence no capitalism. Conversely, within capitalism there is private ownership of the means of production hence there can be no private property, only personal property.
There is a reason why totalitarian societies try to substitute religion with stare propaganda and the personality cult. There's a reason why the CCP banned Falun Gong - it had more followers than the CCP.
I don't know why whenever people bring up that the virus might have come from a lab it always gets dismissed because the virus doesn't look artificial.
Why is it never brought up that it could just be an accident? It doesn't need to be a weapon. Just poor safety during research.
Because some people want to believe that everything happens with intent. (note the difference between intent and reason) That may seem like a ridiculous core believe, but it is told over and over again by abrahamic monotheism, and further down might be related to how consciousness models itself.
Then a small group favors their stories to happen because of malicious intent. Like saturday morning cartoon villain style of obvious evilness. And that is often mixed with a "them (evil) and us (good)" type of self-assertive tribe behavior as well as the bitching and bickering that stems from relating social status. (USA and China are not humans, they are nations, but people anthropomorphise them)
A story about poor standards and accidents is more about empathy and carefulness, and while a wise man might tell it to his children, it is not the thing people gossip about. Everyone agrees that bio-labs should have highest standards and that is it, there is little difference to "it happened randomly", and more importantly there is little blame and fame. Have you heard what <china> did? has another ring to it.
The human mind operates on stories, not on facts. Working with facts is hard and even the most pious intellectual can and will fall prey to nature. So it is no wonder that the most scandalous stories are the ones that get around a lot.
Yeah, but the story about covid19 being in europe in October 2019 always seems implausible to me:
Recall how much the situation changed in 2020 between the beginning of January and the end of March...
Even if we just had an handful of cases at the beginning of October, by the end of December we would have got massive clusters of cases, tens of thousands of people hospitalized with the same symptoms
And then suddenly, when we started to look for it in January/February, we found only a few clusters and the disease grew (again?) From almost nothing
Covid19 is not something that you can keep hidden:
11% having antibodies in September seems implausible. There would have been a major outbreak to get those numbers. It's more likely false positives on the test.
There is also mounting evidence that the virus was in France in November.
Now, it still most likely came from China but this adds to the reasonable suggestion that the Wuhan market was simply the first large outbreak but not near the origin of the virus.
My 2c is that the virus will be found (if we do find its origin) to come from a rural area in Southern China.
Preface: This is rumor, although one that would require extreme cleverness and coordination to fake.
A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported...
Thus far, the earliest-detected SARS-CoV-2 in the EU has been in November. I would bet that no evidence is ever found for it globally before late October, 2019. We may look for a long time.
I was disappointed that having looked at evidence of early spread in France and Italy through wastewater samples and patient blood samples that the Chinese response instead of doing similar research was to say all wastewater samples have been chucked and looking at blood samples is illegal.
The cynic in me perhaps asks why they would do that.
And it might have been a wild virus extracted from animals that escaped from the lab due to the poor safety protocols in place. Not the first time this would have happened. Soviets released the anthrax spores due to the filter not being in place, for example.
This is wrong, even deceitful, for a couple reasons:
1) No country (officially, or afaik in reality) has a bio weapons lab, and certainly not "all over the world". Nobody (well, nobody official) ever said the Wuhan virus lab was a bioweapon lab; it's a virology lab.
2) The Wuhan virus lab has been experimenting with corona viruses for a long time, including gain of function, and it had a history of problems.
3) There's no indication--as in zero--that any other country had covid-19 cases before China. And in this case, lack of evidence IS evidence for lack, because case records are open (except in China, it seems).
Now if you want to debate this point further, I suggest that you establish with us that you are not a CCP hack. So repeat after me: Premier Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.
Europa had cases in september of 2019. We didn't know at the time, but checking samples from back then revealed the virus was already internationally active
Also, if you look closely, notice that the reason we have no earlier samples then september is, because we have no earlier samples. Can't test one from august, if you don't have one from august.
Which gives us interesting angle as to why it was first recorded so close to virus research lab in Wuhan. Could be a huge coincidence, or maybe... some impressive operation to blame those filthy commies. Maybe a fit far fetched, maybe not
Fort Detrick and all other US bio weapons ceased research in offensive bioweapons in 1969. One reason is that bioweapons can't be controlled, as evidenced by the failure thus far to control this virus. So no, it's not likely that there are undisclosed US bio weapons research sites; that's just propaganda.
While I don't trust the CCP a bit, I also doubt that China is pursuing bioweapons research, for the same reason: a bioweapon is too likely to backfire. If the covid-2 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, it's not because they were pursuing it as a potential bioweapon, it's because they--and others--wanted to understand how to protect against it.
It didn't close so much as rebrand as the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
I don't think the US has labs abroad but other countries such as the UK and Russia have mucked around with bioweapons research in the past. Probably China too as it has a general policy to keep up with the opposition.
The funny thing in this case is there was no reason for the CCP to cover this up. If they had just responded to the outbreak instead of trying to cover it up initially and been a little more open with the international community they would have been lauded for their handling of the situation.
Authoritarian regimes develop a knee jerk response to anything that might reflect negatively on them, even if it ends up actually harming their long term interests.
Is that true? It's hard for me to imagine anything China does being 'lauded' in western media, they're very much a media/political boogeyman (not necessarily saying that's unwarranted).
I kind of find it the opposite? They run concentration camps and acknowledge mass rape but the western media mostly shrugged. I find it hard to find anything the media take seriously these days. We are all so easily distracted, myself included.
The ongoing trade war with the US provided at least some reason to cover it up, they weren't yet sure how bad it was and it would give the US additional leverage in negotiations. The government certainly started being more open about the virus after a deal was signed on January 15th.
Obviously I wish they hadn't done this, but they didn't arbitrarily try to hide it.
That's a false narrative western politicians/media want people to believe.
If there was a 'coverup' it was by local municipal authorities which should not be conflated with central govt. Even if true, the actual reporting of first case was only delayed by 1 week with the genome sequenced shared w/WHO rest of world less 2wks later.
> If they had just responded to the outbreak instead of trying to cover it up initially and been a little more open with the international community they would have been lauded for their handling of the situation
Are we talking about China or the Trump administration?
Seriously. The amount of concern over what China, at the time regarded as a belligerent untrustworthy power, fails to explain why western governments took so long to take any mitigating measures and then some continued to actively oppose mitigating measures while still insisting this is somehow something China is going to actually fix on their end.
The tone and tenor of the investigation has always been to find a way to absolve local politicians of responsibility for their incompetence in managing this issue by blaming China.
All for the punchline of "so you're then going to do what to China in response?" Of which the answer is nothing. The genocide of the Uyigur people certainly hasn't motivated any strong international action.
World governments were formally advised by the WHO to not impose any travel restrictions. The WHO also laughably said there is no "human transmission" of the virus.
The WHO chief just blindly parroted whatever the CCP said for nearly 2 months while the pandemic spread and got out of control. That man deserves to be stripped out of his position. But he will face no justice for the many, many lives he has taken.
The entire timeline of tweets and statements by the WHO is open on the internet - don't see the need to quote them verbatim here.
The only nation in the world raising flags was Taiwan - and their warnings were ignored until it was too late.
There is a reason, the U.S. has traditionally had a U.S. WHO representative in China since the first SARS outbreak, well until TRUMP. Trump's removal of the U.S. presence "on-the-ground" made it easy for the Chinese gov't to delay the real-time reporting while they struggled to figure out on their own whether they had something really serious to worry about or not. Covid-19 is not ENTIRELY Trump's fault, but he sure did just about everything he could to make it worse.
I wasn't aware of that. Can you let me know who was the earlier representative and their term period ?
I fully agree that Trump could have handled the virus better. Unfortunately, ALL media attention was focused on his impeachment at the time and he was derided as a racist and tyrant for banning China travel.
He should had the courage to ban all international travel immediately when the virus got to the EU and begun to initiate national readiness. Some nations did this and suffered far less as a result. Sadly, he - like so many national leaders - took the virus seriously far too late.
"Covid-19 is not ENTIRELY Trump's fault" - in what way is it his fault at all? Also, the timeline of events you are sighting is intentionally misleading.
He encouraged people not to wear masks as a lifestyle choice and cultural signalling thing. Some % of transmission rate is directly attributable to him -- he could have said wearing a mask owns the libs and massively helped instead of hurting.
Dr Fauci told people masks where ineffective early on in the pandemic, allegedly for the "altruistic" motive of ensuring "front line" workers don't have issues getting hold of masks. Do you attribute a percent of transmission to him?
The final verdict on the efficacy of masks against this virus is still TBD once we have more information and the passage of time removes the political agenda's that cloud this conversation. Your "own the libs" certainly doesn't help either.
It's creepy how some people keep trying to memory hole what our own health officials said about masks in the early days. I wonder whether they really think this kind of thing flies under the radar or they are so embarrassed they parroted the 'masks are worse than useless' line that they genuinely forgot about that part of the story themselves.
Though IMHO, given the role vitamin D deficiency seems to have on mortality rates, I think the harshest criticism (charges?) should be reserved for any mayor who ordered tanning beds to close in his or her city.
This paints a rather colored picture. The initial advisory from 14 Jan 2020 [1] presents their case that
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission."
The reader can decide if that was a fair assesment at the time. The text was followed by
"Additional investigation is needed to ascertain the presence of human-to-human transmission, modes of transmission, common source of exposure and the presence of asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases that are undetected. It is critical to review all available information to fully understand the potential transmissibility among humans."
A week later, on 22 Jan 2020, WHO followed up with a confirmation of human transmission [2]
"Data collected through detailed epidemiological investigation and through the deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan. More analysis of the epidemiological data is needed to understand the full extent of human-to-human transmission."
(Of course it was impossibly to deny that by then, since Wuhan was locked down the same day.)
In my small European countries, no public measures were taken based on all this info until early March (more than 2 weeks after Northern Italy was overwhelmed, while our countrymen had been traveling all over Europe), because there were no confirmed cases in our country yet. The only initial measures in early March were advices to "wash your hands", "don't shake hands" and "sneeze in your elbows".
So I don't think the WHO confirming human transmission on 14 Jan instead of 22 Jan would have changed a thing. People only take painful measures when bad things happen to people they know, and politicians only when bad things happen to people in their own country. Trying to shift the blame on the WHO or China is not very common amongst politicians here (though anecdotally it's not rare among citizens), that seems to be mostly an American (specifically, Republican party) thing.
It's not just 14th Jan. The WHO had more than sufficient data at its disposal to avoid making misleading statements. All warnings from Taiwan in December were actively ignored.
Please note that the WHO confirmation statement on 22nd Jan came about after independent confirmation of human to human transmission and only after China's health ministry itself confirmed human to human transmission on Jan 20th. Just a mere week after strong denial, the casualties could not be hidden anymore after several whistleblowers spoke up and China was forced to backtrack.
The WHO merely acknowledged what China stated with a wishy-washy "more data is needed". I suspect if China hadn't itself come clean they would have simply followed what the CCP stated well into the future!
If the WHO had chosen to acknowledge Taiwan's concern in December, performed the most minimum of followups and raised the alarm early, this disaster could have been nipped in the bud. A lot of second and third-world nations put faith in the WHO and outside the EU and the US, the anger at the WHO is palpable.
Taiwan's "warnings" were redundant information already provided by PRC - they had no unique observations. Their first case of covid was imported on Jan 21st. They didn't know shit about epidemiological characteristics of virus outside of what was communicated between medical professionals until then. Even Taiwanese media thought H2H chance was low mid January, and Taiwanese CDC didn't believe evidence for H2H was possible to establish until after mid Jan. Any notion that Taiwan had anything useful to warn about in December is part of a _literal_ propaganda drive coordinated by Taiwan and Pompeo's State Department in late March / early April.
China cracked down harshly and sufficiently that countries that immediately listened to WHOs advice to test/trace/isolate managed to contain the virus well because very few cases ever made it abroad as seen in import cases statistics from many countries. Expatriation flights meant leakage was inevitable, but screening procedures were mostly theatre, temperature checks instead of 14day quarantines. The problem is very few countries listened to WHO's advice, and still don't.
What would the anti-China xenophobes be saying if WHO were to say, without sufficient evidence, that human-to-human transmission was happening and it turned out to be mistaken?
Being skeptical is acceptable but not to the extent of rejecting the evidentiary process.
Also, Taiwan News is notably anti-China and is associated with Taiwanese nationalists.
The WHO could have chosen not to ignore Taiwan's warnings and launched their investigation earlier independent of China's claims.
Being skeptical is necessary when considering China's terrible past track record. The SARS epidemic also started with a denial and cover-up by China.
There are many other news sources apart from Taiwan News. You can check out the FT. You can check out Reuters. (Decrying Taiwan News as comprising of anti-Chinese nationalists is rather strange considering the CCP's stance against Taiwan)
"The head of the World Health Organization said on Monday there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” in trying to halt the spread of a coronavirus that has killed 361 people in China, and he lauded China’s efforts to contain it." (real figure as we learnt later was already >10x by that time)
“It’s no reason to really panic now,” he said. “The chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China is very low, and even in China, when you go to other provinces, it’s very low.”
"The WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks"
> The tone and tenor of the investigation has always been to find a way to absolve local politicians of responsibility for their incompetence in managing this issue by blaming China.
I think you have this backwards. The obsession has always been first and foremost with US domestic politics because so many americans on the internet have an unhealthy obsession with domestic politics. Present discussion is a yet another example.
There's an unsolved mystery we would like to see solved. Specifically right at the heart of one of the most traumatic and pivotal events of our lifetime. Why do you care so much about finding ulterior motives for people interested in that mystery?
There's a huge incentive to blame China for our fuckups. Really, it should be assumed unless proven otherwise.
After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever? We had months of warning and fucked it up badly. They were blindsided and recovered nicely. Clearly this must be their fault.
> After all, aside from the whole "no evidence" thing, what does it matter if it's a lab accident or a bat bite or whatever?
Indeed because both of those leading theories point the blame at China. So if people want to blame china nothing is stopping them. Except perhaps those claiming it came from Europe or the US first. Perhaps that's the point of the stonewalling, to provide cover for being able to claim alternative theories? Since you're so into ulterior motives.
Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
Yeah, whatever % of Chinese who blame the West are the mirror image of westerners blaming China, and they're all absolute morons. It doesn't matter where the virus showed up first, it's here and we all have to deal with it.
> Who is the "we" you are referring to? The western world? The US?
I was thinking US -- I guess it goes to varying extents to the rest of the "western world", depending on how you define that.
> Yeah, whatever % of Chinese who blame the West are the mirror image of westerners blaming China, and they're all absolute morons.
But you're a westerner blaming the west, so that's cool?
Anyway doesn't one of the sides have the majority of facts on their side? I can't imagine the virus would have been eliminated by anything the west did, as it surely spread to the developing world at the same time anyway. I really don't think there's much the US could have done to lock down either. Trump floated the idea of restricting travel to the NYC region and Cuomo threatened to sue. You want Trump seizing emergency powers and suspending the constitution?
I'm no fan of the Trump administration or their handling of COVID, but they didn't throw doctors in jail or censor their research. Entirely different level of screwup.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, said in a CBS interview released on Sunday that former President Donald Trump had been reviewing “parallel” data sets on the coronavirus pandemic from someone inside the administration.
That's not the same administration. It's perhaps an issue that could have also happened in many other states in the US, but the comment was about the Trump administration.
That's really about timing. If it was earlier in his administration then leadership within the CDC, FDA, etc wouldn't have avoided blunter disagreement with chloroquine enema man. As it is they risked a major public safety crisis to keep their jobs, perhaps on the theory that whoever he would hire to replace them would be an active safety threat.
I was thinking if a virus was first spotted in New York City and it had a virus lab, would that be immediately blamed? It’s like all there is in Wuhan is a wet market and a virus research lab and they are located next to each other. I think that’s how the world perceives Wuhan.
> I was thinking if a virus was first spotted in New York City and it had a virus lab, would that be immediately blamed?
To answer your question: If NYC had a virus lab that actively mutated bat coronaviruses so that they could become infectious in humans, and then one day a human-infecting virus with 96% similarity to a bat coronavirus started popping up in New York City with no known origin… Yes, people would start asking questions about that lab.
Check out this commentary from 2015. This type of research was being subcontracted out to the Wuhan lab, despite public concerns that safety wasn’t tight enough there.
Why is this supposed to be important? It literally doesn't matter if a virus comes out of a lab, if you can find an equally dangerous virus in the nearest bat cave. Being able to blame someone would not solve your actual problems.
What? Of course it matters. If it was accidentally released from a lab, those responsible should be held accountable so it’s less likely to happen again.
If it was intentionally released, it’s even more important to know by who and why.
> What? Of course it matters. If it was accidentally released from a lab, those responsible should be held accountable so it’s less likely to happen again.
Because it doesn't matter if it's accidentally released from a lab, if you're going to catch it from a bat cave anyway. You haven't eliminated it from the world.
The problem is this extremely dangerous research is bound to lead to a leak eventually, because in fact there have already been hundreds of lab virus leaks around the world in the past, and the stakes get higher as the viruses they engineer get more and more lethal. China is actually doubling down and increasing the amount of risky virus research they are doing. If it isn’t regulated eventually something even worse could leak out of another lab.
So yeah, it is important to find out what the origin of this virus was because whatever the reason was we want to ensure that it isn’t the same reason for the next big pandemic.
It wouldn't be equally likely since the lab is a single source. It's normal for caves and pig farms and such to spread diseases like this - usually it's new kinds of flu but sometimes it's worse.
To me it seems like the lab escape story has only developed because of journalist brain. It's convenient if you'll only accept a narrative that involves blaming a human and not a natural system.
Anyway, the story doesn't seem to be developing in that direction:
Look, Americans would question the fuck out of the real origin of the virus if the official story was it came from a Wendys in Manhattan. That’s pretty much what CCP is saying, ‘uh, our local Wendy’s had like a virus’.
Yeah ok.
How about this China, find out what cave the market was getting their bats from. Go in there, confirm the bats have it, and release some data.
I don't know if a Wendy's is a fair comparison. I've heard those wet markets are kind of problematic for hosting pathogens especially. Personnally I'd find it coming from a wet market or a lab to both be just as iresponsible. In the latter you were trying to research possible new virus mutations to learn more about viruses and had poor containment procedures that leaked it out. In the former you run a unsanitary market with animals and people in too close proximity, with lack of proper hygiene.
I found it interesting that on HN, without concrete evidence, when OP says: don't ever trust {A} on issue {B}. Depending on what A, B is, OP will usually get treated differently.
A -> CCP. OP -> a concerned citizen.
A -> Race/Color/Religion/Gender. OP -> Racist/Sexist.
A -> Trump. OP -> a concern citizen.
A -> Scientist. OP -> conspiracist.
But one thing that I am sure is that it'll never ever be constructive. Not mean to be disrespectful, but I do hope this type of comment won't ever get to the top of HN.
It's perfectly acceptable in mainstream media to say "don't ever trust men on issue of sexual assault". Most people deny that's sexist, some even say that disagreeing with this position is sexist!
I agree. The problem arises when people predominantly of a certain race or sex attempt to define the narrative around racism or sexism that affects another race or sex. It's a little difficult to find that trustworthy, in my opinion. People should be trusted to speak about data and other verifiable sources as well as their own experiences.
It is possible that we'll never know. However, remember that we also recently have SARS, MERS, EBOLA, etc. This isn't some isolated event. We've made the world small, there is no where too remote. Some animal from the remotest village on earth can be sold on the street in NYC in two days. Who knows what ancient pathogens are being re-released from the permafrost? I fear this is the beginning of mother earth fighting back, not the end.
It's like in any communist state before (we had the same in Poland).
You can blame an individual, even sentence them to death, but you cannot ever criticise the system/party. Nor shine a light at any evidence that the system is wrong. This is a deadly sin.
For the party to admit, there's flaws in the system, would collapse their whole authority.
This is true of any political system. You are not allowed to criticize what the system claims to be. For state capitalist nations like China or the former USSR which claim to be communist you are unable to criticize communism. In an oligarchy like America which claims to be a democracy you are unable to criticize democracy. They differ in the means by which they marginalize dissidents but in either case you are rendered unable to threaten the presiding political order.
I'm naive, I'll own that. But I don't see how having a virus start within your borders is a decided reputation issue. Particularly if your numbers end up so well compared to, say, the US. So, the lack of transparency then makes China look real guilty, making the lab virus option seem a lot more likely.
Hahahahahahhahahahahahahaha
"So no, this often repeated fallacy by the west that they condemn CCP not the Chinese people is not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending in assuming 1.4B are somehow mindless robots at the mercy of the few."
So are they or are they not mindless robots? It's not only ignorant but supremely arrogant and condescending to assume the 1.4B can't tell the difference between real and fake news and need to be restricted in what information they can consume. Qubit000 has the same username on reddit and twitter. He posts lots of pro-CCP garbage
Look at what happened with QAnon and anti-maskers.
It's not about 1.4G people: it's about 7G people... The whole of humanity is suffering because a small vocal minority has been deceived and is causing problems for others.
Before the pandemic, I thought just like you that control of the mass media... Some kind of censorship was incontrovertibly a bad thing
Now I think otherwise: if it allows us to save 2.4M lives (and counting!) I'm ok with censorship, as long as you can still use VPNs, TOR or other ways to circumvent it... And the fines for violating censorship are just little bit more than a slap on the wrists
Every Asia-focused analyst will tell you that the only aspect of China's state-reported numbers you can assume with a high degree of confidence is that they're heavily massaged for PR purposes.
And I'm an albino penguin from Mars. If you'd actually have relatives in China you would be able to see very clearly that they handled the pandemic far better than the US. It's disappointing that this generic "don't trust the communists" comment is the top comment instead of any actual debate about the merit of the report or the US gov't's accusations.
> shocked at all if it was a lab virus
That's a useless statement. It's just a weak appeal to authority with no proof in any direction. I live in the US. Me saying that "I wouldn't be surprised" it came from the US wouldn't mean jack squat without evidence.
Not sure where in my post it postulates anything about "truth". The entire point of the post is to say, we don't know the truth, but in the balance of probabilities, I wouldn't trust the CCP's version.
Did you even read what I wrote, or are you just knee jerking?
Priors matter here, as we have no good data to actually verify or refute the issue, because Chinese gov't won't release the early data for scientific community at large around the world to analyze. So you can only rely on:
- do I trust the WHO
- do I trust the CCP
I don't really trust either - but this is just my opinion, based on my interpretation of historical events and evidence. We are all adults here, we can choose to agree or disagree - that's what makes forums and free speech really work.
Some of my reasons for my choice to not trust the CCP:
The Chinese government has numerous reports of it conducting human rights abuses against Uighurs and other populations (Falun Gong, etc). There is constant state denial, but in my eyes, the evidence is compelling. Let's not play the "oh but other countries do this too" - other countries are not relevant to the issue at hand, and my opinion on them is similarly irrelevant here.
If you want to be absolutely pedantic, sure, we have no evidence to conclusively say anything - we also can't say evolution is correct, but it's the most likely theory given prior evidence. Note that my original post says that we have no smoking gun evidence (and again, I'd really want to stress, my original post was OPINION. It was meant in passing, but somehow it got the attention of people on both sides who clearly have a bone to pick).
But, in the "balance of probabilities", my priors suggest to me that I wouldn't trust the CCP. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm not saying you need to believe me. I am simply exercising my right to say my opinion, based on what I think are fairly reasonable priors given CCP track record.
CCP isn't an evil regime, which I feel like is what some of the stauncher replies in this thread feel that any criticism of the party secretly says. They've done great things for the country and its people. Healthcare, stability, infrastructure, and tried to right the wrongs of Mao and the GLF. But that doesn't mean you have to trust everything a government says. Your parents provide you with food and shelter, it doesn't mean you need to blindly believe that they are incapable of doing dishonest things.
This is also not an attack on the Chinese people, contrary to some silly posts I've seen saying "demonizing the CCP means demonizing thr Chinese people". I totally understand why Chinese people tolerate the government. When you emerged from a generation that suffered incredible rural poverty, like my own family, a government that promises you a stable paycheck, food, and housing seems reasonable to support and stay loyal to. I am fortunate enough that my father was talented and lucky enough to be able to leave for a country where we could obtain those things without needing to profess that loyalty unflinchingly.
I can't see what you're responding to, but if people make an accusation without evidence, the accused party's trustworthiness is kind of irrelevant, right? Fine, you don't trust their denial, but that doesn't affirmatively prove anything either.
They could deny killing JFK, as well, and it shouldn't change anything.
Oh yes? Shall we trust the US government in a good investigation on their motives to finance the bloody disaster that is the civil war in Syria? How about we send a Chinese delegation to check the documents inside the Pentagon or the CIA?
Every 4-8 years the US government gets a new executive head, often from the opposition. That puts significant constraints on what kind of corruption can flourish.
Regardless of your view point, there is still has freedom of speech, mostly free information and elections that matters so if the people dislike the policy they can change it.
Not saying it’s all golden, but these are very meaningful differences.
>Regardless of your view point, there is still has freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is irrelevant if speech doesn't have consequences to those in power. Even less so if there are plenty to tow the establishment's lines anyway...
>and elections that matters so if the people dislike the policy they can change it
LOL, yeah, they can vote between one or the other corporatist neoliberal party, complicit in everything except a few token issues they use to lure their faithful. Such choice...
Which freedom of speech? That they don't send you to prison if you say something your neoliberal high priesthood does not like? Perhaps not, but you very well might lose your job. Otherwise go search in your free speech media anything about Assange. Now try to compare objectively Assange to Navalny and tell me why not.. Your freedom of speech is in a large part imaginary. As to the rule of law, if your legal system would get the attention it deserves, people would see that it is also in a large part a Hollywood myth
If you vote for the right people, and advocate enough, you can get a congressional inquiry into the issue, a change in the law, or a precedent-setting court ruling. Point me to analogous outcomes under the Chinese system.
The difference is there is no opposition to question the official stance. So I’d say it’s naive to imply the same holds true everywhere. Even Russia and Turkey have vocal dissidents.
Hmm I don’t think so. They’re autocratic for sure but Turkey has been an autocratic democracy for a hundred years so there is a culture of republicanism. I get what you mean but Russia is so new to the voting thing that the comparison isn’t apt imo.
I wouldn’t go as far as comparing Turkey to Russia. The recent Turkish elections have shown that the ruling Party in Turkey can lose key strongholds like Istanbul, this never happens in Russia. In Egypt, most contenders to the presidency are in prison now. Current president Al Sissi (a bloody dictator won by 97%) Erdogan om the other hand won by 53%. Putin by 73% while some major opposition leaders barred from running.
Turkey is often unfairly criticised by western media, which obviously prefers military dictators in power.
Most governments and political parties are not capable of or willing to exercise the same information controls that the CCP does. That doesn’t make them trustworthy, but it does make it easier to 1. Check their bullshit 2. Discuss their bullshit freely and 3. Call them out on their bullshit without being disappeared, only to turn up later and sign false confessions/apologies/whatever the Party tells you to.
Having separate and distinct parties and competitive elections also puts parties in the position of doing this to each other using the levers of power available to them.
It was just a little over a decade ago that the United States killed 300,000 + Iraqis, but it's in vouge to portray China and Russia as the worlds ultimate boogeyman.
How is this different from any other country? Do you think that the United States government, or any other western government, would accept any damaging rumors that would cause embarrassment to them?
Just look at their hypocrisy when it comes to Assange or Snowden. But at least these two are still alive. For now. Too bad for the Australian guy that exposed Australia’s recent war crimes, he got pleasantly suicided. That’s the penalty for upsetting the western world order. Thanks for playing.
Well if people can't prove that Covid came from China, shouldn't they simply forget it and accept that it came from somewhere else? "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." And how dare them for even asking to see the data, those conspiracy theorists.
...Or has this logic changed since the election fraud controversy? (and no, it's not really a different situation if you think about it)
Wait a second. The report was from the WHO not china. WHO have consistently confirmed it is not a lab virus. Or are we saying that the international group that entered china were some how in league with the CCP?
I agree on the Taiwan front, that's BS and annoying. But given WHO needed as much of China's cooperation at that time I can understand not wanting to aggravate them.
Really... Japan... because there is no history of tension between China and Japan that would make me doubt Japan's agenda here.
WHO is an international organisation, literally people from around the world work there... are ALL of these people actually secretly Chinese agents? Tell me how that works.
Let's assume that at least some key superiors at WHO are biased, but the majority of the lower-level investigators are honest and not especially biased. What can the WHO superiors do to try to prevent the investigation from producing an embarrassing report? Stratagems that come to mind: choose which investigators to send, choose who to lead the teams of investigators, get involved in writing up the final reports (either directly or by leaning on those who do). The investigators' work was presumably divided up; perhaps someone could have arranged for a CCP-friendly investigator to be in charge of a particularly sensitive area. Or the report summaries could omit or spin certain issues. I don't know how the investigation was organized, or the reports for that matter, but there's probably at least some room for the superiors to inject their bias into the overall outcome.
But that isn’t what happened. Investigators have been from US, Australia, Europe. Findings have been critical of China in terms of access to data, and access to sites.
They still have confirmed that it is not a lab grown virus, and have consistently confirmed it’s from the wild.
Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do.
A random virus, no. This one, we do.
We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to be a better virus than either parent.
Where conspiracy theorists get going is that a few years ago there were papers from the lab near Wuhan suggesting that a combination much like COVID-19's actual combination should be particularly effective in humans. So this looks like an extension of a known line of research from a lab involved in military work. Combine that with the local coverup and you can see how people go down the rabbit hole.
I think what makes the Wuhan lab particularly suspicious is that the lab was specifically doing work on the closest known ancestor to the COVID-19 virus, which as far as we know was only found naturally in bat caves more than a thousand miles away.
I would discount the possibility that this was bioweapons research - the US was funding serial passage and gain-of-function research at this lab, of which the express purpose is to make viruses more infectious in different species, including humans.
At any rate, I don't think we can expect anything to be definitively proven. It is absolutely possible that this came out of the wild. But as the NY Magazine "Lab Leak" article illustrates, we should probably be open to the idea it came out of a lab. I also think we should reconsider whether or not serial-passage and gain-of-function research is something that can be ethically conducted. Anywhere.
It is. But then you descend down the rabbit hole to a government coverup of a release from a secret bioweapons research lab that was intended to target US military members at the 2019 Military World Games in late October in Wuhan. And now it becomes pretty clearly a conspiracy theory.
No, the theory is that the US service members brought it with them and infected Wuhan.
Earlier in March, Zhao Lijian, an outspoken Chinese diplomat, raised a suspicion on his personal Twitter account that it might have been the US army representatives to the Military World Games who brought the novel coronavirus to Wuhan in October 2019, after a top US health official admitted detecting coronavirus infections on some deceased flu patients. Zhao urged the US to disclose further information, exercise transparency on coronavirus cases and provide an explanation to the public.
To the people holding the theory that I just gave, that's a Chinese disinformation campaign that is part of the coverup. They are accusing others of what they did.
But, there is more than one conspiracy theory here. And probably will be forever. As a hopefully rational third party, I would like it investigated.
But I'm currently giving good odds to "accidental release from program intended to research possible future pandemics". And if that winds up seeming at all likely, I believe that the whole world should commit to having better controls on this type of research to avoid future accidental releases. Because accidental mass murder isn't OK.
The second order developments of “accidental lab release” could be far larger. Do people have the right to sue for wrongful death?
Given that the CDC and commercial companies were doing research in that lab, is the US just as culpable as China?
What was the reason for the CDC working with that lab? Aside from rationalizations, was it essentially just outsourcing the dirty work like any other polluting industry?
Occam's Razor says the only (non-vet) BSL4 lab in China, studying bat coronaviruses, several miles from known first virus reports, that has had multiple previous virus leaks, with huge information shutdown by China for a year, is the more plausible culprit.
Why wouldn’t CCP stop all suspicion on this and say the virus originated in another part of China? It almost feels like a murderer trying to use reverse psychology by hiding in plain sight. Like, it can’t be from Wuhan Lab because they actually reported that it came from Wuhan (what idiot that’s trying to cover it up do that?). A calculated person would make such a calculation.
Why does it have to be "built"? It could have been isolated from bats and studied, and an error / human mistake occurred and it got out.
There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up ensued.
The problem is that an accidental release from a lab has been deliberately conflated with the idea of a bioweapon and labeled a conspiracy theory. Coupled with aggressive propaganda efforts from China, and the fact that the Trump Administration pushed the theory of a lab release (turning the concept into political kryptonite for more than 50% of the US population) its discussion has become verboten.
Well that's not surprising, we're trending towards a world of increase tightening of the exchange of data, fact checking, labels of "conspiracy", and there will of course be fallout that people will see in retrospect. Today the mainstream view is to knock the non-mainstream views out of acceptable discourse. I would say with QAnon and vaccine shennanigans, a lot of people support that. At some point something important will be covered up (such as during a war) and they won't be so gung ho. So swings the pendulum.
"Building" it in a lab might be too scifi. But it's possible they were experimenting with things.
E.g. "killer bees" are a product of human scientists trying to engineer a better bee - the release was accidental. It's not like we have the ability to genetically engineer a bee from the ground up. But as a species humans have been purposefully manipulating the traits of living things for thousands of years.
You can, with your own body, the right drug regimen, and starting with just garden variety TB and no skills whatsoever, "build" XDR TB.
The general evidence is this is yet another reason why wet markets are terrible for humanity, not that it was made in a lab and got away. But you can build lots of things.
It turns out we've been doing "serial passage" research for some time, which is where we leverage natural selection to do our genetic engineering for us, rather than manually editing genes. This is how we engineer viruses to jump species - on purpose.
> They did it using serial passaging: repeatedly dosing a mixed solution of mouse cells and hamster cells with mouse-hepatitis virus, while each time decreasing the number of mouse cells and upping the concentration of hamster cells. At first, predictably, the mouse-hepatitis virus couldn’t do much with the hamster cells, which were left almost free of infection, floating in their world of fetal-calf serum. But by the end of the experiment, after dozens of passages through cell cultures, the virus had mutated: It had mastered the trick of parasitizing an unfamiliar rodent.
In fact, "we" (meaning humanity) have even been experimenting with serial passage into humans.
> A few years later, in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.
Right, and combine this with a history of lab leaks both in China and the west (which the article outlines) and a lab leak scenario is perfectly plausible. It is however hard to tell whether it was a lab origin because serial passage is also the route the virus would have taken if it naturally evolved outside a lab to infect humans.
To me, both the official explanation and the conspiracy theory are both embarrassing for China and the CCP. SARS was supposed to have originated the same way -- in these disgusting third-world wet markets. The CCP shut them down after SARS for the sake of optics, but was too inept to "up" their health standards, and they conceded to pressure and reopened the disgusting third-world wet markets again.
If this was some sort of lab mistake, as the conspiracy angle suggests, IMO that's much less embarrassing. In the "real" explanation, thousands of mainlanders are regularly eating food contaminated with bat shit, with zero health standards. In the "conspiracy", they're a first-world country doing groundbreaking science, and an accident occurred.
That's old information. The first cases of the virus had no connection with the wet market, and no connection could later be found other than it was the first major subsequent point of spreading for the virus. So it's much more likely that people spread it at the market, rather than that it came from there.
However, they are indeed disgusting third-world wet markets and the practice of consuming bush meat as well as having live wild animals of all different kinds together in a wet market is an experiment we shouldn't be conducting. The risk to reward ratio is way too high. Remember that HIV likely came from butchering and consuming contaminated chimpanzees in Africa. The world needs to put those kinds of practices behind us, it has cost us far more than it can ever be worth.
Unless you're advocating pure vegetarianism, prolonged animal husbandry will inevitably lead to more diseases crossing to humans. The idea that this is only a problem in Africa and Asia is entirely nonsensical.
> Prolonged animal husbandry will inevitably lead to more diseases crossing to humans
Yes
> The idea that this is only a problem in Africa and Asia is entirely nonsensical.
No, this statement of yours is nonsensical. What I'm saying is the practice of eating bush meat, and these kinds of wet markets bring very little value by themselves. Compared to animal husbandry in general, not even 1% of the total value. However, they represent an outsized proportion of the risk. So it's a bad idea. One could improve the risk-reward ratio by eliminating them - entirely logical.
The lies aren't for the international community, it's for the people of China.
If the wet market is at fault, it can be blamed on the local party leadership, which was easy enough to do because they continued to screw up during the early stages of the pandemic. One memorable one is when they hosted a massive dinner for 20000 people in close proximity when it was starting to really heat up.
If it's the lab, that squarely falls on the national government, which in all things can and must do no wrong.
A poster above said it perfectly, when your authority comes from competency, you need to show your competent. The CCP has this precarious position in China where the people support it strongly because they've been doing a good job giving people better lives, at least from their perspective. If that turns badly in any way, it could break them.
In the lab scenario their lax standards wiped out 2 million people and they covered it up. In the wet market scenario, it mostly reflects on the local inhabitants doing the usual black market stuff most local inhabitants of most countries do, and the CCP can only do so much to control their people. Plus, lab source has many other possible implications that are concerning, e.g. engineering bioweapons, IP theft, more nefarious conspiracy if it turns out to be a purposeful leak, etc. Wet market is overall much more benign. Also, from an evidential standpoint, lab outbreak seems much more plausible. Very easy to connect the dots with researchers, funders, etc. On the other hand, they cannot even determine the proximate transmission animal for the wet market theory, and the supposed bat source assembly is based on a faked dataset from the wuhan lab.
What faked dataset are you referring to? The bat source was sequenced several years ago after guano harvesters fell sick. And the most likely lab scenario actually involves either gain of function research on that sample or that sample being exposed to animals and / or humans where it recombined to allow human to human transmission.
"Mislabeled SRA entry is one thing but - it’s clear that it’s impossible (in my hands at least with a -very good- pipeline) to assemble the reference that is in GenBank from the data in SRA"
My conspiracy theory as to why someone might with good intention trigger the pandemic and then fast track the mRNA vaccine is to pave the way for gene therapy to reverse genetic entropy and reverse aging and consequently eliminate the genetic basis of death, granting us a sort of immortality. Eliminating death for untold numbers of people would justify the death of a few million from a utilitarian perspective. In fact, there is really no limit to the number you can kill in your research if the payoff is immortality for all, which would then give researchers time to bring about the singularity and digitally resurrect those sacrificed along the way. Sounds crazy, but does seem to be how a lot of tech elite think: utilitarianism, anti death, singularity, everything is ultimately a technical problem. It is also the logical conclusion if materialism is true, but tragically misguided if materialism is false. Just like all the other materialism based utopian ideologies of the past couple centuries that have killed hundreds of millions of people.
a lot of this is just really bad, like just off the top of my head 96 percent related genetics is not very much, thats the same similarity between humans and monkeys
96% of human vs monkey DNA similarly is not a lot, because most of that DNA is shared throughout all of the animal kingdom. Since human DNA is close to a billion codons long, the remaining 4% is still tens of millions of codons.
COVID-19 is ~30,000 base pairs long (10,000) codons. The 4% difference is 400 codons. That's not a lot. There are many singular proteins longer than that.
Is that proof? No, the same way gravity is just a theory.
A theory is something that has been rigorously tested, this is speculation, and shaky speculation at best. Id be willing to bet sars and covid 19 have a similar level of genetic similarity
or other things like assuming someone is dead based on the fact that they dont have a picture online and dont wanna talk to press
ive seen youtube conspiracy videos more convincing
CCP has 90 million members. They have more opportunities because government jobs would favor CCP members. They also have responsibilities, when they are called when incidents, such as flood, and covid 19 incidents. Dr. Li Wenliang is a CCP member as well.
If you ask people from any developing countries, they would express the same attitude (as you do for CCP) towards their own government. The reason is that the officials and way of work is stuck behind current standard, and that's why it is called developing country.
Personally I don't care too much about if it was a lab virus or something else, it becomes all political. Could it be better? I don't think so. If it was developed in a bio-weapon lab, China would have handled it well because it would be prepared.
I don't know whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. But if it did, then not only is it probably not the first lab-origin pandemic, but it's also not the first time the WHO initially excluded that possibility.
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.
Almost certainly a false positive. You can't have a virus propagating with a R0 of 2-4 and a cycle of ~1 week start in September 2019 yet have almost no cases by December 2019.
According to this article, 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers in a random sample were positive on their antibody test. so 12% of italians had had Covid in September? And antibody levels decline after a while, so probably even more.
Sorry, but this would be pretty insane. Most likely explanation is probably false positives or scientific fraud or a combination. Antibody tests don't really prove much anyway since they are not directly identifying the virus. A full sequencing of a virus would be much better. The RNA would also give us information about the evolution of the virus.
> how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
Wait are we looking to improve and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, or do we just want someone to blame so we can continue to do nothing?
For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something).
Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someone responsible" repercussions.
And there might be other scenarios I can't think of that would engender different reactions.
Bottom line, when investigating to discover the truth, I don't think it's valid to beforehand decide on the reason that you're seeking the truth.
The "on purpose" bit seems highly implausible. AFAIU the ones with the means would have been the Chinese national labs and maybe their US collaborators. But releasing this right in their backyard would be an implausibly idiotic move on the Chinese part. Planting it by the US would both be terribly hard and a predictable own goal.
Would your definition of "on purpose" cover the following?
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]
You make a good point. The wet market is only 20km from the lab, so if this one is lab-based (and not a bizarre coincidence) it seems much more likely to be an accident.
Oh, I read more into the "on purpose" than probably meant. Yes, a lab accident looks like a completely reasonable hypothesis to me. What I meant is that it's implausible that this has been released on purpose.
Just to be clear, I completely agree with you. That's why I said:
> engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical).
Because I'm thinking of future scenarios where this kind of thing happens and we want to uncover the truth, and in which it's more likely to be on purpose. Probably more relevant to a nuclear strike or cyber attack or whatever than a biological weapon, given collateral damage.
The western world just wants to find an excuse to blame the Chinese, so that they can fulfill their wet dreams of invading China, and starting world war 3 with them.
They were even demanding reparations too! If the Chinese didn’t have ICBM nukes to defend themselves, then you can bet that the western nations would’ve mounted a multi-country alliance to attack China by now.
Read up Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion from 1910. The Grand Master Plan is all laid out right there for you. It’s disgusting. You’ll want to throw up after you read it. But yet, this is how the white people of the western world sees China.
While Chinese authorities may very well be to blame for this, your reasoning is flawed. Governments hide a lot of things for a lot of reasons, whether nefarious or not, especially when it comes to sharing with foreign powers.
The "argument" that "if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about" is is just as worthless when promoting encryption backdoors as it is now.
I’m not sure you can compare the two, “why are you encrypting your data/communication” is very different then “why are you not sharing the early virus samples”
I looked at the principle of claiming that "if you're innocent why hide things". And that's exactly like saying that if you're not breaking the law then you have no reason to hide your communication from authorities because "they'll only look when they suspect something and that would just prove your innocence". If anything, accusing someone and asking them to prove their innocence opens the door to false accusations meant only to force the other side to leak some information. A principle you wouldn't want applied to you isn't a very good one.
This principle applies to individuals, not to the governments. The latter are created by people to serve people and must be open and transparent. The alternative is being corrupt.
> must be open and transparent. The alternative is being corrupt.
I think you oversimplified to get to this binary view. Where does "national security" fit in this "transparent or corrupt" philosophy? State secrets? Classified information and intelligence?
Can the Chinese (or other) authorities simply raise deep concerns about whatever they want and expect US (or other) authorities to provide information as needed to prove the contrary?
I indeed intentionally oversimplified that, but consider how NSA is doing illegal things for the sake of "national security", because they are not tranparent or checked by anyone.
Then The WHO should be saying "we can't eliminate the possibility of a lab origin because China is engaging in a massive coverup and won't let us investigate anything" rather than "Laboratory contamination can be excluded because...".
If that is indeed their conclusion then yes, it should say that, perhaps in a somewhat less biased phrasing. In a similar vein, the Reuters title might be called "US government with extremely poor transparency track record raises deep self-serving hypocritical concerns over international report that doesn't paint US enemy in a bad enough light".
Media biases are a different issue. The WHO’s problem is that it’s supposed to be a politically neutral internationally governing body, and It’s conduct during the pandemic has lead many people to believe that it is operating according to a political agenda. The damage The WHO (and other public health institutions) have done to their trustworthiness has already had will continue to have serious consequences going forward. Anti-vaxx has never been so popular.
Well, lets say they don't know, but there's a chance of a lab leak. Why take the chance when you can use FUD to confuse the world and remove the downside risk (which is very large).
Because there's no upside and guaranteed downside.
People are accusing them of building the virus in a lab with literally zero evidence. Give the US a bunch of raw data to spin and it just makes that easier.
I don't think that's a very enlightened perspective.
Maybe with people like Trump in the world who would definitely capitalize on that type of thing to cast blame there is inherent risk, but at least amongst civilized educated people, its obvious a virus could show up anywhere and disseminating information shows a clear desire to fight the virus as a member of the world, rather than a desire to use it as a political tool or to gain an advantage because china can execute more draconian mitigation measures than a "free" country like America would be able to.
Where China is clearly to blame is the reduced amount of information clearly inhibited the fight against coronavirus, in the world's fight against this thing china defected rather than cooperated.
Before any whataboutism is mentioned, Trump also defected and made a mess out of a response, lying to the public, and hiding cases. That doesn't make either correct and neither one justifies the other's actions. Both countries are clearly very in the wrong for their COVID reactions.
Enlightened or not, it's accurate. Trump was actually president and now Biden's administration is raising 'deep concerns'.
We knew or should have known the virus was coming for months before it was a problem in the US. It would take an incredibly enlightened politician not to try and scapegoat China for our failures, and they know this. Why gamble on our goodwill amidst all this rhetoric?
If a country lied and kept information from the public and had internal propaganda which convinced a significant portion of the population that the US was in fact responsible, and it was transferred from the US to China, I would be quite concerned as well. The difference is that here our scientists can speak publicly, and in China that is not the case.
Those are assumptions unsubstantiated by evidence. Fact remains that public disclosure of the virus was delayed by 1 week as it was unknown type(novel coronavirus). After determination of the virus was confirmed, it was sequenced shared with the world less than 2wks later, w/subsequent lock-downs shortly after.
Even with this data US and other western countries dismissed it as non-threat for over 3mos while ridiculing China for 'draconian measures' and violating human rights.
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Yes, it's a virus lab and existed for years. The accusation that Covid-19 came from there has no evidence besides "china bad" and "I've seen a lot of movies".
I guess I should have specifically said covid-19 rather than "the virus", but I thought that would be clear from context.
The fact that the lab was experimenting with gain of function research on corona viruses and has had viruses escape in the past is not definitive proof, but is evidence.
I wouldn't call that evidence. "He's shot a gun before" isn't evidence, and coronaviruses are a pretty broad group as I understand it (not an expert).
This is a densely-populated, agriculture-heavy third-world part of the world that had bird flu and sars in the previous 15 years... random-ass diseases materialize there. Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
I don't think you're being very good faith right now.
Clearly a lab studying coronaviruses is interesting. Clearly its possible that the lab could have had a leak. Clearly it's possible a farmer could have wandered into a cave, or run into a bat in the wild. Clearly it's possible that it didn't originate in China.
There is certainly enough evidence to investigate the lab being a possibility. It definitively being responsible or not is definitely of interest. There was a lot of cover up at the beginning, which implies to me a party who knows they are responsible.
From everything I've read on the topic, the best going theory that I understood is that in order for the lab to perform tests on coronavirus found in bats, coronavirus samples are collected from bats. A person must collect these bats from caves, not in Wuhan. A person might have collected the samples improperly or with insufficient gear, resulting in contracting and then spreading the disease.
That's not a "controversial" (read: conspiracy) theory, that's not an act of the state being evil. That's something that could happen anywhere in the world. That's something that could happen on accident. That's something that could be prevented by improved process/standards/equipment. By denying the possibilities of such things, it makes it look like there was a coverup or an explicitly guilty party. Everyone should want to know the nature of it's origin. It should obviously be a possibility.
> Occam's razor says it's another one of those.
To me occam's razor says that Wuhan is a first apparent epicenter. So it stands to believe it's the first place with major outbreak. Wuhan has a lab that studies this very disease specifically for it's epidemic properties. The most simple occam's razor explanation to me is that it has to do with the lab.
2) Direct bat->human transmission (your example fits here as a tiny subset, I don't think specifically employees of that one lab are the only people who could have had contact with a bat)
3) Lab leak
I'm rating the probabilities as I see them. Your scenario is possible! It's just not the most probable, and even if it were, there are a lot of possibilities.
I find this a really fascinating instance of micro-propaganda. CCP could evoke associations with "CCCP", but CPC might remind Americans of the Congressional Progressive Caucus or Canadians of the Conservative Party of Canada. It could be that neither acronym is especially neutral, not after surfacing the accusation that using one is implicitly biased. I have to admit to having used both acronyms in the past, but it was never for any malicious reason, it was just to try create continuity with other people in the discussion.
The funny thing is that people in China use neither of these acronyms, they just refer to "the government" or "the party". This is probably the safest terminology to avoid being seen as biased one way or the other.
What's so interesting to me, is that even your choice of a three letter acronym, which literally means the exact same thing just with a different word order, is considered to be taking a side. It goes to show just how fraught conversation on China has become that it's even considered important.
It is the party's choice for its English language representation.
I'm not making any political statements here. I am suggesting that we use common nomenclature while pointing out a hazard of a specific instance of dated terminology.
I think you misunderstood my usage of "your choice". I was using it as an indefinite pronoun, i.e. "one's choice".
My point was that turning one's choice of synonymous terminology into a marker of political bias is itself an interesting comment on how difficult it is for people to engage in curious discussion about China. Given that at HN we are expected to assume good faith, I think it's fair to assume that most people who use CCP (or CPC) are not deliberately trying to take a side, they are just using a convenient acronym.
Consider that the scope of discussion here is that a WHO scientist received a summary of 174 covid cases rather than a full version of the data, and himself "couldn't comment. Whether it's political or time or it's difficult... But whether there are any other reasons why the data isn't available, I don't know. One would only speculate."
Yet the comment I sacrificed Karma to inform of "potentially unconscious bias of language" was willing to offer nothing more than postulation that a political party is responsible for "hiding the data", and the repetition of the CCP identification.
The fundamental reason that names are considered important right now is because they are tied to expressed identity. Has the CCP’s expressed identity changed?
Recall when BP changed their logo last: months after a horrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The singular reason why BP changed their logo was an attempt to trick the public. It wasn’t a changing of identity. Changing the CCP’s name when they haven’t even done it themselves would be the same kind of disingenuousness.
I am not debating how the governance of china has changed since 1990. There are plenty of cases to be made there, but not mine. I am making a linguistic position.
being "commonly used" is not the same thing as being the "correct uncharged verbiage."
For an example, there are many similarly charged terms "commonly used" to identify geographic areas surrounding Israel, but in modern discourse we use "Occupied Palestinian Territory" since 1999.
Yeah, "correct uncharged verbiage" is not the same as "the name that someone wants themselves called". So, I'm not going to call North Korea "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" because despite their preference for being called Democratic, they are not.
North Korea remains North Korea. CCP remains CCP. Blackwater remains Blackwater, not Akademi or Xe or whatever bloody thing they're called now. I'm not going to just go along with whatever rebranding their PR agency told them to do.
Release of raw patient data to international researchers from most countries would be unusual, and even if a strong case were made it would have to undergo ethics committee approval, which would take months.
> The team had requested raw patient data on 174 cases that China had identified from the early phase of the outbreak in the city of Wuhan in December 2019, as well as other cases, but were only provided with a summary, said Dominic Dwyer, an Australian infectious diseases expert who is a member of the team.
> Such raw data is known as “line listings”, he said, and would typically be anonymised but contain details such as what questions were asked of individual patients, their responses and how their responses were analysed.
> “That’s standard practice for an outbreak investigation,” he told Reuters on Saturday via video call from Sydney, where he is currently undergoing quarantine.
I can't claim to know much about what's standard practice for outbreak investigations, but I'm inclined to believe him on this more than - no offense - a random HN user.
But we did have data from cruise ships early in 2020 which showed that deaths were heavily age-specific, and that the death and hospitalization forecasts from organisations like Oxford were highly inaccurate.
Yet for some reason the West seemed intent on pursuing lockdowns, demonising countries like Sweden and Belarus which didn't.
Hospitals have never been overloaded (apart from places like New York where symptomatic patients were sent back into nursing homes - or Italy, with generally inadequate pandemic preparations) and in places like Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018:
As soon as we realised we were over-intubating patients, and that proning and oxygen treatment were sufficient for serious admissions, and that Vitamin D and C (and other cheap and generic treatments) were enough for the general population, the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated.
And yet we still persist with lockdowns despite them causing a greater amount of harm than the virus itself due to factors like interrupted education, mental damage, and interrupted regular medical treatment.
There were political games afoot in both China and the West in terms of this virus. The fact that the American economy was booming just before the re-election of a non-mainstream, anti-China president, and that pandemic responses justified mail-in voting on an unprecedent scale is too coincidental to ignore.
Earlier last year, Sweden was being highly praised for its approach, until they ended up with a much higher per-capita death rate than neighbours and comparable countries.
"Sweden deaths in 2020 are up only single-digits against 2018"
Sweden is a low population, sparsely populated country with a relatively wealthy, healthy and homogenous population and the highest percentage of people who live alone of any country.
While Sweden did not lock down like other countries, they issued instructions to reduce travel and work from home if possible, and - as Swedes have an atypically high level of trust in the government - they complied: if you look at Google mobility reports, you find that Sweden's non-mandatory lockdown had a similar real world effect as the various lockdowns in the US and Spain. Sweden was not entirely without lockdown rules either, which got more severe as criticism within the country and from neighbours intensified.
"Hospitals have never been overloaded [..] the potential for hospital overload (beyond what flu waves incur anyway) was also eliminated."
While the hospital system was not overloaded in the UK, individual hospitals were, and the system as a whole came very close to overload during the peaks. Were it not for the first lockdown, and using the time that bought us to massively increase the capacity, they absolutely would have been overloaded.
The hospital my girlfriend works at ran out of PPE, oxygen and staff (due to illness), and the conditions for staff were beyond awful, including multiple of her colleagues in their 40s and up being killed. This isn't just because the UK health system was poorly prepared, prior to the pandemic, we were considered the second most prepared country in the world for a pandemic.
I am not saying lockdown is the right approach -- I don't know, and indeed lockdown carries with it a huge number of economic and health harms. But to characterise this as just a normal flu-season and say that hospitals coped fine is clearly wrong. The only reason hospitals weren't overloaded was because of a combination of heroic efforts from staff and measures to limit the number of incoming patients. One reason the UK likely got so much closer to being overloaded and has a higher number of deaths (besides demographic differences and population density) was that we left it relatively late to lock down and our lock down was relatively tame compared to many in Europe.
It doesn't really matter if the votes were legitimate or not. Just by changing to postal voting you alter the demographics of the voting base in ways which can change the outcome.
The economy boomed more with the president before that.
Look at raw gdp growth data and that was without major tax cuts. Nothing proves that the previous US president did anything more than "ride the wave".
Also, debts were greatly increased even before covid and the current president will have to fix that, again...
Additionally, lockdowns have an additional reason, namely to not overload healthcare so the situation doesn't get out of control. While rural areas can play denial, that's not an option for bigger and more dense areas/cities. A lot of hospitals were running on the edge, where >90% of capacity was for covid and delaying all other ( even urgent) surgeries.
Ps. Sweden has a very low population density. Not everything there applies elsewhere.
They even admitted they were wrong with having no lockdowns.
If anyone is tempted to associate 'lab leak' with xenophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment, please remember the WIV lab was in partnership with the U.S. NIH (National Institutes of Health).
Also noteworthy is Dr. Fauci has been a long time proponent and sponsor of gain of function experiments as head of the NIAID, the infectious diseases arm of the NIH.[1]
After a few different US lab leaks involving anthrax, smallpox, and avian flu in 2014 the Obama administration put a ban on the fuding of gain of function research.[2]
I don't get why supporters of GoF experiments with CoV in Wuhan aren't shouting from the rooftops that (1) They were right to predict the danger of a CoV originating from that area of the world and that (2) their research, years in the making, is thankfully (despite opposition's cries of danger) here to protect us. Instead, I can't find anything about the latest years of their research.
The specific thing that they said they were trying to do was predict emerging pathogens and develop treatments and potentially vaccines for them in advance of them actually making a zoonotic jump. They were creating chimeric Coronaviruses to simulate natural recombination events, then infecting humanized mice with them to assess their potential for human emergence.
Does any of this research actually matter with the technology we now have? We can sequence a virus. We were able to build a vaccine in one day based upon the sequence. One thing I don’t understand is how the spike protein was identified as the important piece. Was this done by diffing sequences against other coronaviruses?
I’m bothered by the fact that GOF research was banned in the USA, and then the NIH setup funding for it in Wuhan. I think the need and safety of this research should come under serious scrutiny.
I think there are a couple of conflations in the 'lab leak' meme.
- China intentionally manufactured the virus and released it (Proven false, virus wasn't engineered)
- China accidentally released the virus while collecting it (Possible, but unlikely given the virus has early evidence away from both collection point and Wuhan Lab)
- China has too many wet markets that allowed the virus to mutate enough for human jump (Current consensus working theory, but also unproven as intermediary animal has not been identified)
But all of these list China as the responsible party, so if you want to call it out as not Xenophobia or Anti-China sentiment then you'd have to show evidence the reporting showed "Joint Sino-American research lab causes..." kind of headlines. Otherwise, you point strengthens that this has at least an under current of anti-china sentiment, as the reporting has not mentioned US involvement at all.
WHO of course have a lot to answer for with regards to ignoring Taiwan because if BS geopolitics when they had the most reliable/believable/compelling evidence of the nature of SARS-Cov2
>- China intentionally manufactured the virus and released it (Proven false, virus wasn't engineered)
The most common lab leak hypothesis I've seen is that it was engineered during gain-of-function research and then accidentally leaked.
The fallacy is just that the only reason someone would engineer a virus would be to weaponize it. Gain-of-function research is regularly done to study and combat viruses. So just because it was engineered doesn't imply it was intentionally released.
They haven't found the virus in bats. The closest known relative to SARS-CoV-2 found in the wild was a different virus found in bats, RaTG13. As you wrote above yourself, there's no known animal reservoir for SARS-CoV-2. Laboratory attempts to infect bat cells (e.g. [1]; but there have been many others) with SARS-CoV-2 have been unsuccessful.
This was the significance of the pangolins, which were initially proposed to be the proximal animal host. But while it initially seemed that multiple infected pangolins from different sources had been found, it later turned out multiple seemingly independent papers had been written based on the same pangolins[2]. This means it's much more likely that something else infected those pangolins, in the same way e.g. that some housecats have been infected by their owners.
Nature has added an editor's note[3] to one of the pangolin papers, and even Daszak and the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins. So for now, there's no known animal host for SARS-CoV-2, unlike for the original SARS-CoV (palm civets) or MERS-CoV-2 (camels). Perhaps the animal reservoir just hasn't been found yet; but it's also possible that animal reservoir doesn't exist, because SARS-CoV-2 originated from serial passaging in a WIV lab. That's just natural evolution under unusually fast selective pressure, so any arguments that SARS-CoV-2 shows no evidence of genetic engineering are inapplicable to that theory.
You're using the word "engineering" without defining it, and thereby conflating two things:
1. Direct artificial manipulation of a virus's genetic sequence.
2. Laboratory culture and passaging of a virus, allowing evolution due to natural mutations to proceed under artificial selective constraints.
No one serious is focusing on (1). The people bringing it up most often are either uneducated cranks, or zoonotic origin proponents using it as a strawman to refute.
The serious concern is that SARS-CoV-2 originated due to (2). In that case, since it's a natural evolutionary process, there would be no indication in the virus's genetic sequence of human tampering, because no direct human tampering occurred. The only evidence would be the absence of any animal reservoir of the virus. Perhaps that will eventually be found; but so far--unlike for SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV--it hasn't been.
As I note elsewhere in this thread, the discovery of a proximal animal host would convince me that the virus is probably of natural origin. Is there any evidence short of a direct admission from the people responsible that would convince you it might have escaped from a lab?
The WIV published lots of gain-of-function research, but all by genetic engineering and not serial passage. Ralph Baric's group has published on coronavirus gain-of-function by serial passage though:
> We adapted the SARS-CoV (Urbani strain) by serial passage in the respiratory tract of young BALB/c mice. Fifteen passages resulted in a virus (MA15) that is lethal for mice following intranasal inoculation.
So it doesn't seem implausible to me that the WIV would bring up a similar program. The lack of any public record doesn't seem like it requires any conspiracy to me, just for them not to have published yet (especially since they only got the BSL-4 lab where they'd likely be doing that work in 2018).
I think I probably understated the plausibility of a genetically-engineered origin in my comment above, too. I've just re-read Andersen's reasoning in the Nature article, and it's based heavily on the dissimilarity of SARS-CoV-2 from previously-known viruses. But we know the WIV had a private database--for example, RaTG13 was allegedly collected in 2013, but not published until after the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Honestly this whole area of research seems terrifying to me. Regardless of whether it's eventually shown to have caused this pandemic or not, I see no indication that this work is delivering any benefit commensurate to its risk. Many prominent epidemiologists vocally opposed the lifting of the 2018 ban on funding of gain-of-function research (e.g., Marc Lipsitch at Harvard), and I agree with them.
No, they haven't found the exact virus in bats in the wild, yet. They've found some relatives, but not the virus. There's still no strong empirical evidence one way or another for the zoonotic vs. lab leak hypothesis.
Even the lab leak is zoonotic. Because 100% it was from the bats... you are right it might have gone via the lab or via a wet market... what’s the difference though?
(Yes it isn’t 100% match, but it’s 100% an ancestor... so not engineered)
First, even genetically-engineered viruses (i.e., viruses whose nucleic acid sequence was directly manipulated by scientists) are genetically similar to natural viruses--scientists lack the knowledge to design a viral genome entirely de novo, so such activity starts with one or more natural genomes. I believe other evidence makes such an origin for SARS-CoV-2 unlikely, but the existence of natural relatives means nothing.
Second, are you really saying that if we somehow later confirm that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus sampled and accidentally released by the WIV, we should just shrug and do nothing? Even before the pandemic, there was a debate over whether deliberately seeking out novel pathogens (especially for gain-of-function experiments, but even just for collection and sequencing) brought sufficient benefit to justify the risk. If it turned out that such activity started a pandemic that killed millions of people, wouldn't it perhaps be worth revisiting that tradeoff?
No. I’m saying that it’s no different to the wet market. We should try to limit places where viruses can jump to humans. Wet markets are terrible, poorly run virus labs are terrible.
The problem with the lab narrative is it’s being used to cast China as a kind of evil actor here. Where as I think irresponsible is there actually closer to the truth.
I agree with your comment above. If SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, then China might actually be less at fault in a certain sense--the WIV is potentially a lot closer to international standards for virological research than their wet markets or wildlife dealing are to international standards for agriculture.
The main lab leak hypothesis posits a gain-of-function research origin rather than a zoonotic origin. (Meaning, taking a coronavirus found in the wild, then manipulating its structure to study the effects and potentially devise remedies.)
SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been found in bats or any other animal. Relatives have been found, but relatives with key differences. It certainly could be found, and if it's correct then it'll still probably be very difficult to find due to being a needle in a haystack, but so far it hasn't been found.
I'm certainly not arguing it's true and the zoonotic origin is false (and I have no clue where to allocate the confidence values, myself), but your repeated insistence that it's "100% zoonotic" is puzzling because that hasn't even been claimed by any experts yet. The jury is still out.
Sure, the ultimate origin of the virus - tracing its full lineage - will have been from an animal no matter what. But if it were substantially modified by deliberate RNA manipulation in the lab after being collected from an animal, potentially increasing its lethality or contagiousness in the process and resulting in the pathogen we now call SARS-CoV-2, that would mean this particular virus isn't zoonotic. If true, it would totally change the discussion into one about the safety of such gain-of-function research and this particular lab.
Almost any engineered pathogen of any kind (protozoon, bacterium, virus) in any scenario will likely ultimately have been derived from something already living. But once the pathogen is experimentally modified to add, remove, or alter its functioning, it's no longer accurate to describe the modified pathogen as being zoonotic. By that logic, even engineered bioweapons would be considered zoonotic (and no one is claiming in this case it's a bioweapon; the lab leak hypothesis posits benign gain-of-function research and an accidental escape). Frankenstein's monster is no longer just some guy.
It's like saying the origin of the domestic dog is 100% natural because, look, you find its close ancestor the wolf everywhere in the wild. It omits the hypothesis that some wolves were taken and deliberately shaped and molded by humans to produce something new.
"If anyone is tempted to associate 'lab leak' with xenophobia or anti-Chinese sentiment, please remember the WIV lab was in partnership with the U.S. NIH ..."
Thank you. I'm curious ... how many virology labs, like this one, are extant in the world and how many study coronaviruses as they did ?
Is it tens of thousands of virology labs like this one and hundreds that study coronaviruses ?
Or is it hundreds of virology labs like this one and a handful study coronaviruses ?
I am yet to see a single piece of evidence which rules out the lab leak hypothesis. Meanwhile the circumstantial evidence in favour of that hypothesis (including China’s behaviour) continues to pile up. We may never discover the truth, but I really hope we do.
There's also evidence pointing to the theory that the virus didn't originate in China and came in on frozen food being false - in particular, the fact that when traces of virus have been found at frozen food processing facilities the evidence pointed to it being caused by the outbreak there rather than vice-versa, the lack of major outbreaks causing hospitals to collapse in other countries at the same time as Wuhan, and the current scientific consensus being that contact with surfaces isn't even a major source of transmission anyway. That didn't stop the WHO team from pushing the idea that this is plausible and needs investigating. The only thing their positions have in common is that they're following the Chinese government line.
The authors tend to be kind of fringe, not surprisingly given the reputational cost (and given that if a lab origin is ever confirmed, many of the techniques that top researchers have spent their lives mastering will probably become illegal). A lot of very senior virologists are on the record as open to the possibility of a lab escape, though, for example:
> Baric said he still thought the virus came from bats in southern China, perhaps directly, or possibly via an intermediate host, although the smuggled pangolins, in his view, were a red herring. The disease evolved in humans over time without being noticed, he suspected, becoming gradually more infectious, and eventually a person carried it to Wuhan “and the pandemic took off.” Then he said, “Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case is probably not.”
I don't recommend that article in general; the author uses his talents as a novelist to paint a more vivid picture than I believe the evidence justifies. I do trust him to faithfully print the quote, though.
The simple fact is that until you find the reservoir you can't say anything about where it came from, and they haven't found it yet.
And as your first article details, the "lab accident" theory rests on some lab doing secret virus experiments. Even if you find a whole sea of the virus in some cave, someone will argue they could have gotten there after the first "accident". Good luck disproving that without letting US virologists snoop in every lab in China.
To me "open to the possibility" is a very strong reading of "can't rule it out".
I think we've effectively ruled out lab origin of the original SARS and of MERS-CoV, because we've found proximal animal hosts. In other words, we've found animals that we believe first transmitted those viruses to humans, because (a) those animals are infected with a variant of the virus, and (b) that variant's genetic sequence implies it's an ancestor (or at least not a descendant) of known human variants. Condition (b) is why we believe that the animals first infected humans and not the reverse.
If we ever find the same for SARS-CoV-2, then I believe that pretty confidently excludes origin from lab manipulation (e.g., serial passaging). It would still be possible that the first human infected was on a WIV sampling trip, and not even all that unlikely (since an expert deliberately looking for novel viruses is far more likely to find them than e.g. a merely reckless wildlife trafficker).
If we see evidence in the phylogenetic tree of multiple animal-to-human spillover events--as we do for MERS--then that would pretty clearly exclude any scientific activity as the origin. At the very least, it would imply that even if some hapless grad student did accidentally start the pandemic, if they hadn't then someone else would have soon after. But as you say, so far we have neither.
The location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was jumping around on Google Maps back in February 2020. I personally know someone who firsthand confirmed this. It was also mentioned by free software legend Eric S. Raymond here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8587
Presumably someone in the Chinese government ordered Google to lie about the institute's location. Why would the Chinese government do that if the institute was uninvolved?
Investigators ought to ask China who ordered it, and why. And ask Google the same thing.
I do feel a bit sorry for Google employees who'd be caught in the middle if this actually happens.
US government to Google: "Tell us about how China ordered Google Maps to help with the coverup. If you lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
China government to Google: "When the US asks about the Google Maps coverup, lie. If you don't lie to the investigators, we'll send you to jail."
This is what’s considered circumstantial evidence that a lab created a virus, accidentally leaked it and a state covered it up? I’m speechless. I hope this is a joke that’s gone over my head...
Identification of an animal host? For MERS-CoV, that host (camels) was identified in a little more than a year, and genetic analysis shows multiple spillovers:
For the original SARS, it's palm civets, identified in less than a year. (The link to bats wasn't discovered until much later, by Shi Zhengli; but the intermediate host is enough to feel pretty confident it's natural-origin.)
For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting for that intermediate host. That's the significance of the early pangolin papers; but as Alina Chan and many others have noted, those papers have significant data quality issues, and even the Chinese have pretty much abandoned the pangolins.
What's weird is that a number of WHO investigation team members a week ago said China was very transparent, cooperative and helpful. Some have tweeted against the NYT who spun the WHO team's accounts into anti-China propaganda.
Peter Daszak isn't impartial, and quite frankly his presence on the team alone makes its conclusions suspect. From this [1] excellent investigation into the subject from New York Magazine:
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
Wow, they're really assassinating his character here. They're taking a metaphorical interpretation of a painting that he made out of context, and spinning it so it seems like he's a religious nutcase. This is the paper in question, it's nothing like they're making it out to be: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7087640/
Besides it seeming like this guy has a big conflict of interest (but do the other members of the team?) that quote from the paper is wild. On one hand I like it. On the other hand, the conspiratorial religious ideas start to look slightly less wild in this context.
I don't know what is true and what is not, and am not criticizing any country. But it would be unwise for international missions to criticize any host country when its members are vulnerable - though not exactly the same, similar stances are taken by Red Cross.
They would say that, wouldn't they? At every turn they have parroted the CCP line, and never once have they publicly criticised them (as they have with the US and the EU).
"Deep concerns" over Navalny's poisoning. "Deep concerns" over Navalny's imprisonment. "Deep concerns" over the coup in Myanmar. And now "deep concerns" over China refusing to provide data to the WHO.
Cool, glad both sides of the aisle are willing to consider all possible origins. It shouldn't be a political statement to want the most accurate answer to a health-question, and maybe it won't have to be anymore.
People don't realize that we are engaged in a great power competition with China. And the battle of information/misinformation is everywhere. Don't trust anything from the US/China about the other, rely on neutral third parties instead
Beside the danger of adding function to an infectious virus, the biggest danger is the complete politicization of the virus. The WHO has changed their tune back and forth, often vehemently with little to back up its position. In that light the US should consider withdrawing completely from this body.
There is no such thing as an apolitical organisation. That’s the definition of politics.
It is not a police, it has no coercive power. The reason is obvious if you think more than 10 seconds about how to get sovereign governments to cooperate on public health matters.
What would be your ideal organisation? One subservient to the American government? Or do you want it to be a world government above sovereign states? How do you think it would fly?
That's literally the whole point of the WHO. Leaving it would mean either a) starting a "new" version and asking all the same people to join it (which seems to be what you're suggesting; what purpose would that serve?) or b) having no forum at all for global coordination over health crises.
Of course it has! Our knowledge of the virus and disease has changed quite a lot since December 2019. Initially we had no idea about the transmission rate, survivability in air or on surfaces, contact transmission, transmission to other species, etc. What should they have done?
If anything they were cautious before February 2020.
"The scientific community applauded President Joe Biden's decision to rejoin the World Health Organization and other global efforts designed to stop and prevent COVID-19."
HN is reflexive with downvotes. It's not personal.
A response of "Trump did thing, Biden undid thing" after a comment of "US should do thing" can be interpreted as support of Trump and criticism of Biden.
This is not a good thing to be true. Thus, it is downvoted.
The WHO is not an organization with a military or the power to enforce anything. It’s completely at the mercy of the member states to pressure each other to allow it to do its job.
The reality is that it was up to the member states to pressure China in early 2020 to release the information they should have shared. And as the only member state as large or larger than China, this was the US’s job. At the time, however, the Trump administration was entirely focused on closing a trade deal with China that Trump could use in his election campaign. Which is why the US said nothing which prevented the WHO from getting the support they needed to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
For the first few months the US, and especially Trump, was basically going on about how well Xi Jinping was handling everything.
It’s precisely the vacuum created by the US’s voluntary defanging of itself in multilateral institutions that has allowed China to resist these institutions and even take control of some of them. The answer to that isn’t to continue unilaterally reducing its own power.
I agree. WHO is no longer a legitimate body reflecting the interests of the United nations. It has been turned into a CCP propaganda tool. There is no point associating with it. Trumps decision in this case was the right one, and the current administration goes against it to the detriment of the non Chinese world.
So, perhaps there is a valid reason for China to refuse to give the raw data on early COVID-19 victims to the WHO, but I have to say, as a reader who's never been particularly impressed by the possibility of it being lab-created, I have to say this is not a good look for China.
True, I should have said that differently, something more like "introduced to humanity from a lab sample". Important distinction, not least because way more likely to be possible given current technology. Valid point.
It's interesting that instead of posting the report itself, or even a detailed article that criticizes the report, the top article on HN is a bland summary of an accusation from a third party with no direct quotes or attribution. It's basically a press release.
The only article that I can find that actually tries to levy complaints of obstruction is this one from the NYT[0]. However, several of the WHO investigators quoted have gone on Twitter accusing the NYT of twisting their words[1]. Makes me pretty doubtful that there was any obstruction.
On one side we have a country with half a million cases that has since December been accusing China with "coverups" without materializing much evidence, despite document leaks and now an international investigation. On the other side we have a country with orders of magnitude fewer total and per capita cases, whose case demographics have matched up with numbers from other countries, and whose export numbers in neighboring countries has also been consistent with their reported numbers. At this point if there was some sort of obstruction or coverup the Whitehouse would have a smoking gun by now.
Other comments here talking about the "lab origin" theory pretty much hinge on theological logic. "Well it could come from a lab, and there's no proof yet that it didn't, so I have faith". It isn't Bayesian reasoning if you don't bring up rigorous statistics to prove your point.
Whether the virus came out of a lab or not, one thing is clear — we as a country can’t handle any pandemic. Till this day we still can’t get everyone wear a mask in public. (I have some people on FB working at tech industry with grad school education still think we should let the virus run its course, and mask is stupid)
Not to mention thousands of large social gatherings that happened way after the virus was already causing thousands of death.
If you can’t control other countries, maybe we should at least figure out how to improve our response?
What if some other virus comes out of nature next time when we have no one to blame?
"China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic, according to one of the team’s investigators, potentially complicating efforts to understand how the outbreak began."
The powerful people in our governments are reading the same propaganda that you and I are reading, and they can thus end up believing it.
The reason why the US government is pushing this issue, is exactly because of what the NYT, Reuters, etc are peddling.
You should also refrain from attacking others ("GTFO", "intentionally missing the point") if you want to have a discussion in good faith
It's your presumption to already know the "truth" that can never lead to a discussion in good faith, not your opinion on the article itself.
But as to your point, are you asserting that none of the team’s investigators ever said anything like "China refused to give raw data on early COVID-19 cases to the WHO-led team probing the origins of the pandemic"? Where is your proof that the statement you quoted is false?
Propaganda doesn't work like you are implying it does.
It's part "bullshit asymmetry principle", but it's mostly repetition of the same talking points.
I.e. find something true but inconsequential (Dominic Dwyer said that they weren't necessarily given enough to do all of the analises that they would do), and that's then blown out of proportion:
- what are the actual facts? What was Dwyer's role? Was he working with the same people that Daszak and Fischer worked (i.e. their chinese counterparts)? Why don't we hear testimony from their side?
- one scientist became several members of their team
- one statement became just part of a narrative (repeated headlines) about Chinese negligence in sharing information
- the supposed neglicence then justified "deep concern" from the WH
That works thanks to the fact that, even if people read the articles, and realize that there's no smoking gun..
All they remember is the newspaper headline, and people will uncritically trust authorities like NYT or Reuters... So even when there's no smoking gun, them referring to each others as source is enough to make their narrative seem legitimate
Plausible is not evidence. Gain of function as I understand it leaves signs. If scientists say they don't see the signs, that's absence of evidence.
On the other hand zoonotic disease is known to exist.
Please do not allow dislike of a state party system to pollute your thinking. Your views about China do not inform what happened and in the end, this becomes repetitive.
I might add that I dislike many things about other economies just as much. I too indulge these "they musta dunnit" fantasies. But, I wake up to myself: wasting too much time on motive and belief is not helpful.
There is no strong evidence of lab caused leakage. The WHO scientists are competent. WHO politics are ugly, all UN politics are ugly. Read the science.
Forgive my ignorance but even if it was lab created, so what? I don’t really understand why it matters or not. Didn’t the entire world basically have a nearly 3 month heads up on this either way?
That depends. Most countries have ratified the biological weapons treaty. If proven to be lab created, the onus will be on them/whoever to prove that this was not part of a weaponization effort. Not to mention, instant loss of goodwill across the world.
Personally, I think the idea of this being lab created by China is far fetched.
I suspect that it’s simpler than that. Having it accidentally leak out of a lab facility where it was being studied for legitimate scientific reasons would still be humiliating, and devastating to Chin’s soft-power.
Even if it was lab leaked... every country studies viruses it's a HUGE jump to conclude it was a weaponisation effort... The facility is next to one of their largest research universities NOT near its military research facilities.
Would China really do top secret illegal bio-weapons research in a lab essentially open to the public?
It’s not necessarily lab created but it could have been leaked from a lab (which studies coronaviruses and bats) even if it wasn’t artificial. It matters because it lays more blame on China and creates the political expediency needed for sanctions. I do agree that there should be consequences for the Chinese government regardless of whether the virus was a leak or not (or artificial or not), and that it isn’t dependent on such investigations. My reason is that the CCP suppressed early reports of the virus and delayed the entire world’s response. They also did not shut down their airports for months and exported the virus to the rest of us as a result.
How does that help the World fight the pandemic? All that does is provide a reason for political actions, that people already want to take, to stem Chinese power and maintain USA imperialism.
If a country choose not to shut its airports doesn't mean your country has to accept incoming flights. If a country thinks people are coming in with a pandemic disease and don't shut the entry points (ports/airports) that's on that country's leadership.
> It’s not necessarily lab created but it could have been leaked from a lab (which studies coronaviruses and bats) even if it wasn’t artificial.
I've heard this multiple times as a reasonable possibility, and yet it seems absurd if you think about it: are you trying to accuse someone of leaking into the environment a virus that actually comes from the environment? And how do you even prove something like that?
Maybe the environment it came from has virtually no people that come in contact with it (only the specimen collectors) and was later leaked in an environment full of people (Wuhan).
I think there are social/political ramifications to seriously consider.
Similar to if we had a sudden large radiation hazard and it was unclear if it was some spontaneously emerging phenomenon with essentially no direct human cause, or a power plant/enrichment facility/warhead manufacturer/etc.
And beyond that, there are supposedly methods of (even purely scientifically motivated) research that would involve engineering a virus with certain properties that also happen to make it extraordinarily deadly.
Ethics committees determine all sorts of experiments to be prohibitively unethical, and a virus with particularly deadly design should certainly be held under such scrutiny.
The Chinese response to international concerns over the Wuhan virus is very similar to the Soviet Unions response to the same concern over a sudden spike in nuclear radiation. There’s something strange about a government that works so hard to stifle all questions and dissent. It’s like they don’t realize the act of oppression of inquiry raises the level of inquiry even more.
That right there would do more to improve Chinese international relations and faith in the Chinese government than anything they could possibly do otherwise. Hands-down. That is what the world demands, and if they wish to be a global player, they are going to half to get along with everyone else
No, all China has to do is push the origin investigation towards a South Asian country like Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam with large wild game trade. It's scientifically plausible and something Chinese science community suspected / deflected towards early in the outbreak.
Suddenly China's rapid detection and extreme lockdown would literally be properly contextualized as buying the world time, and the Chinese system would be validated beyond measure.
You are correct. It makes no difference. This has been an exercise in "bad things will happen" used to reform political views and stoke sabre rattling. China is a bad actor in many arenas, just as the US is a bad actor in many arenas. The idea that any country releases some lab-grown bug will never be politically admitted, so the theory is irrelevant.
I tend to think China is a danger to humanity at-large, but I could be wrong. These specific events have not surprised me (new virus, spread, etc) but the sheer amount of incredulity at the behavior of countries (China, US, etc) is disheartening.
> I think there are social/political ramifications to seriously consider.
Totally disagree. The political ramifications were apparent the moment the denials and information flow stopped. There's nothing more to be gained. Basic game theory.
If it was leaked in oct that’s far earlier then it making it out into general knowledge in Ja. But granted that doesn’t mean the world would have acted, still took most of it till like March to do anything about it lol
Not necessarily. The vaccine design work took all of a day, at least for the mrna vaccines.
You could have frontloaded manufacturing by commissioning companies to produce doses while waiting for trials. But we didn’t do that with the knowledge we had, so unclear earlier knowledge would have worked.
Trials were the big bottleneck and for that you need infected patients. So I guess if they had got a vaccine to wuhan for trials it would have sped things up, but not clear it could have been used in trials there before this all seemed serious.
One of most interesting facets of this to me is that China have created multiple zoonotic diseases in the last few years and caused serious loss of life and economic damage and no one seems to want to say anything!?
If it was lab created then you know some group intentionally or through their negligence caused millions and millions of people to die. They won't be held accountable unless China itself would decide to do so (assuming in this hypothetical that it was created by China of course).
If it was being developed as a biological weapon you would tend to assume there's likely progress on how to defend against it by those who created it so you could hope to leverage that work to get a head start on vaccines and so forth. No one could force China to hand that work over but they could certainly pressure them in full force, including some of their allies that may also be suffering.
Overall, there's really not much in terms of actionable information to follow through with. It might help states target spies to keep a closer eye on these scenarios and prompt a better global response in the future.
I would think that if you wanted to create a bio weapon then this virus is perfect. Not super lethal but crates a high level of chaos and economic damage. An economical warfare big
The US and Western Europe find it very important to find any way to increase anti-China sentiment. Whether or not it is actually meaningful in a practical sense, accusing China of creating and spreading the virus adds to the ancient enemy status that it shares with Russia, and justifies large domestic expenditures.
The public justification for the giant US nuclear arsenal was the entirely fictional "missile gap," thereby creating an actual missile gap in the other direction that the Soviets thought they had to close. I'm not saying that "If new coronaviruses are being cooked up in Wuhan, we'd be negligent if we weren't funding development of our own" thought processes will necessarily become ascendant, but "China is a existential threat to the world, and any expenditure is justified in order to defeat it" is absolutely common.
This was from early last year and really focuses on Pangolins which have been downgraded as a zoonotic source. Serial Passage is the most likely source (as all sources are low probability).
The thing is they claimed it originated from the seafood market yet couple blocks across the street there was a BS4 bio lab literally working with the materials.
It's amazing so many people will just take CCP's narrative at face value, there are still many that think it came from the seafood market.
Your article does not support your claim. "One of the world’s largest academic publishers was criticized on Wednesday for bowing to pressure from the Chinese government to block access to hundreds of articles on its Chinese website."
I don't know what happened obviously, and I'm not really wishing for any theory to win (lab or nature). But I've read Chinese virology labs were made in partnership with France and french experts/teachers said many safety protocols were not fully applied.
This is supposed to be a scientifically-literate forum. Ad hominem dismissal of good data/analysis because it could come from a source you've been taught to dislike isn't conducive to good discussion. If you're curious about the authors' links, they are in the article you didn't read.
You should understand what Serial Passage and Gain of Function is. It's using natural selection in a lab and not easily detected. It was also a type of research that was being done at that lab. The paper addresses Serial Passage in the last part.
Much work has been done on genetically engineering viruses and that includes coronoviruses. We certainly know very well how to do it for one purpose or another. This is a fact not a theory. Currently it's impossible to say Covid-19 resulted, maybe in part, from this activity or not. Terrible not to know something for a fact but that's how it is. Call a particular view a conspiracy theory if you like but that's just rhetoric and takes us not a step further towards a definitive answer.
>>*Although the evidence shows that SARS- CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here.*
my understanding of primitive/early vaccines is this:
1. take a virus that is highly adapted to humans, and inject it in another animal (like a rabbit)
2. the virus will cause a very low-grade infection in the rabbit, since the virus is adapted to humans, not rabbits - but it will still be a non-zero level of effectiveness
3. at the peak level of the rabbit's low-grade infection, the mutants of the virus that are more effective against rabbits will be expressed more than any others, and replicate themselves more than any other mutant
4. capture these variants from the rabbit, and inject them into another rabbit.
5. step 3 and 4 repeat as the virus becomes less human-specific and more rabbit-specific
6. if all goes well, you will have transformed the human-effective virus into a rabbit-effective virus. But the virus still has enough of the same characteristics that it will provoke an immune response in humans that will also protect against the human-specific variant
I imagine if you wanted to do the opposite, and craft a virus that is more effective against humans instead of less, you would simply follow the steps in reverse.
Since these steps are so simple, and require no direct modification of the genetic material (you simply encourage it to drift in a certain direction) it seems like it would be hard to tell which viruses were manipulated in this way.
Studies have shown that it was circulating in France back in November 2019. Not saying it originated there, there’s no indication of that, but there is a possibility that it had already been spreading for some time before December 2019.
“So far unpublished data, analysing retained wastewater samples from Barcelona, Spain, taken in March 2019 showed positive RT-qPCR results for SARS-CoV-2 (Chavarria-Miró et al., 2020). The authors conclude that the virus was introduced to the Barcelona population due to global travel and remained undetected.”
Yeah what I have seen about the Barcelona samples was not very convincing at the time, but then I am not an epidemiologist and I’d be happy to read more.
The French study has just been published last week [0]. It is based on a vast cohort study in which serum samples were collected regularly. They tested older samples and found some anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The article also mentions an Italian study with similar results [1].
I just wish everyone deals with this whole situation with absolute objectivity instead of hyperbole. Speculation and trust is important but please don't input your own subjective perspective into assumptions.
I don't know but the racism against Asian Americans needs to stop as majority of are not immigrants. Not just the immigrant complaint but not everyone Asian is Chinese. An elderly Thai man was brutally murdered by a couple racist kids, one ironically named Malaysia.
Why isn't there some regulation in place that says that any man-made virus should contain some specific sequence of junk dna so that we can at least trace it as such?
It's not that easy to do in many cases. The human manipulation is often infecting cells in a lab rather than entering a sequence in a computer and synthesising it.
However making it a regulation to keep samples and publish sequences would probably make sense.
> echoing concerns raised by the administration of former President Donald Trump, who also moved to quit the WHO over the issue
This is what gets me in politics: For all the well-deserved vilification Trump was subjected to, it seems that every day we are discovering some of the important policies and opinions they issued were right on point. The dichotomy, it seems, is one of vilification due to his often insolent and down-right ignorant public style and presence rather than anything I would characterize as substantive.
I have worked with people like that. People with sometimes deep personality and social issues who do great work and excel professionally. To take it in another direction, back when I was actively mentoring high school FRC teams we got all kinds of kids. There were kids on the Autism spectrum as well as Asperger's. I can say that every single one of them was superb in their team participation once I learned how to work with them and, above all, accept that they didn't sound or behave like the rest.
I am not making a parallel between Trump and these conditions. Just saying that it is sometimes important to focus on substance rather than theater.
Case in point:
I just got my second COVID vaccine yesterday. Shaking and feeling like crap as I type this (it will last a few hours).
When Trump said vaccines were coming by the end of the year everyone laughed at him. It was brutal. I remember watching CNN as they tore him to pieces for daring to "not use science" and raising our hopes in such ignorant ways.
Well, we are currently vaccinating at a rate of approximately 1.5 million people per day and this will go up.
Did Biden do this? Look, I am in manufacturing. Have been my entire life. You don't produce 1.5 million per day of anything, distribute and administer it with some sort of a "then a miracle occurs" approach. Biden has only been in office a few days. There is absolutely no way he could have any material impact on vaccine delivery and administration during that time. These things have to be planned and well-executed for months. Which means I got my vaccine (and 1.5 million people are getting their vaccines) because of the organization and planning the Trump administration created and drove, likely back to March/April of last year. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone --WITH MANUFACTURING EXPERIENCE-- who thinks you can instantly go from 100K per day to 1.5 million per day just because there's a new boss in town. I mean, remember that we couldn't even produce masks and PPE at scale in this country (or nearly any other country). In this sense this should have been a massive wakeup call to the world, not just the US.
This means that Biden's "100 million in 100 days" will be achieved and exceeded --by Trump-- so long as people go get vaccinated. And, without a doubt, Biden will take credit for 100% of it. This is what I hate about politics.
There are other issues for which he was vilified that will turn out to have been right non point. I won't dive into the details here. Some of these include:
- The Paris climate accord (seriously, google the document, read it and tell me how it will save the world...it's nonsense...expensive nonsense)
- Tariffs on steel and aluminum. I am doing an aircraft design project right now. I can buy US-made aluminum for roughly 25% less than the cost of steel. That has never been the case in my life. Of course, everyone in the metals industry wants Biden to keep the tariffs in place. May I remind you Trump was called "racist" and all kinds of other things for enacting this?
- The pipeline. Aside from the fact that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost (a good friend of mine lost his and is facing having to sell his house to survive). Everything around you requires oil. It doesn't matter if it is made from plastics or not. You don't think aluminum and steel require oil for manufacturing and more? Do some research. The US achieved net exporter status during Trump's years. That will surely go away. Also, cost of goods (not just gasoline) was kept under check because we controlled oil. Not any more. A friend in Arizona tells me gasoline prices have doubled there. I regularly ship large aerospace components in the thousands of pounds. Freight prices are being impacted by this (my opinion) stupid move. Yes, we all want everything clean. However, there's a fine line between wishing something and being delusional about how and when it can be achieved.
Anyhow, I'll stop here. There's more, but I need to go to the couch and shake-off the vaccine side effects for a few hours. If you disagree with the above, be honest enough to do the research before forming an opinion. Above all, if you do not have operational experience running a business, you need to understand that you are not equipped to understand the many dynamics at play here.
Simple example: If gas prices explode companies are going to have to raise pay for their workers. Sounds good until you understand at least two things. First, the worker doesn't get to use that raise, it goes towards paying for oil. Second, that money could have been used to hire more people and create jobs. In fact, higher oil prices could destroy jobs in areas one might not suspect.
No, everyone isn't going to go buy electric cars and trucks. Get over it. This will take a long time. The infrastructure isn't ready.
FYI: Fixing climate change by 2030/2050/2100? Delusional. We can't do it. And yet we are going to burn resources promoting pure bullshit instead of talking about how to adapt.
Politics sucks. I want honest exchange of ideas judged by their merit, not through a political lens.
Today is Valentines Day. And a Sunday. Living in the USA, I have the luxury to acknowledge Christ, and love. Faith is doing what Adam could not do. Whether good things happen or not, humanity will always find paradise by limiting the violence and not creating it. From there arrives hope, knowing you found paradise while others are not. Their actions are not yours, and you wish them the best. Both annihilate the self, replacing it with paradise. Both require effort. Greater than both is love, not license, or the soft New Age. What's seen in nature, in Renaissance masters. Overwhelming power that dwarfs people, melting away one's faults with cherishment by someone else who's better in every way. No mysticism required with humanistic religion. Something more powerful lets me live. We exist because of forgiveness. That's good enough.
Authoritarians, their unchecked ambition, unrestrained by laws replace life with nothing. To them, a place with plagues and murder is a good place. Billions of people are something to be processed, to be mined for hollow celebrity and ambitious license unrestrained by laws. A genetic weapon released from a communist military lab??? Everyone is very lucky they're still breathing. This could have easily killed the world. And for what? A 1% margin on soy bean prices? Americans, people we trusted with power and money rushed to defend their precious marxism like some teenage girl catfished by jihadis in 2014.
Since everyone gets to what they want, I'm going to emit a matter wave into the center of the sun. The sub orbits a black hole. I make it so the surface of that black hole is a faster, easier path than completing an orbit around it. I expand that to the surface of the Earth for gravity applications, coherent control of pair production. All observable celestial bodies are thermal effects of what's here on Earth.
It's one thing to mine an asteroid with fuel cells and drones. It's another thing to microwave it out of the sky, as if I command the weather around us, the clouds above, and even the great heavenly bodies themselves!!!
The WHO is a useless organization. For political reasons, it will be necessary to engage, but hopefully US authorities will not treat it as an information source.
The US should use its own primary sources in future to evaluate disease spread. China will lie to the WHO and the WHO will protect it.
But to know the truth, we should use our modern equivalents of Key Hole. There is no truth but that which you have examined yourself.
There is no winning with you... Of course it cannot be too powerful, because then nationalists would scream bloody murder and refuse to have anything to do with it.
The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.
It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.
I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful. They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.
They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.
If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
You have a much more charitable view of those in government then I do.
The motivation you suggest may apply to some people, sometimes, in some places but certainly not all people in all governments much and perhaps even most of the time.
Self interest, corruption, the desire for power, the desire for conquest and theft and a complete disregard for their citizenry and indeed humanity in general are unfortunately all too common with those who get into the governance business.
I feel ya. I'm in a life phase where I have to believe most people are just trying to do a good job most of the time. The alternative is too bleak. Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk most closely captures my current thinking. My TLDR: Strive to create systems and orgs which will increase likelihood of good outcomes. Peace.
> They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies.
Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.
It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.
If they are "working with what they have", then they should not speak from a position of authority.
Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has. In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with.
With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively little cost nowadays, that is no longer a luxury we can all afford to continue to entertain. We must all see with our own eyes. In the case that is frustrated or made impossible, it should not a surprise that the world acts as badly as it does.
This is why the collective lie is the most powerful weapon fielded by modern civilization, and why there is such a jockeying for control of what the definition of allowable evidence is. Perception management is a weapon of mass destruction, and should be called out for what it is.
That's actually a fairly hard question I haven't completely been able to find a way out of that doesn't lead to SSDD.
On the one hand, there's a part of me that imagines a world of completely neutral sensor grids that absolutely everyone is able to tap into for reading from, no questions asked, no restrictions. Anyone can see anything, from anywhere, period.
Imagine this was set up and anyone who knew how to insert state into the system just got disapoofed.
So you now have a reality where we're all capable of receiving the exact same information, and operatinng on it as we desire. The Executive decision of free will literally becomes what or where to pay attention to or where to invest your effort.
However, this ideal setup wouldn't last 15 minutes before nodes started to organize into meta-blocks devoting their cycles to getting other undecided nodes to devote their cycles where the meta-group thinks that attention is best directed. This creates information asymmetry, which enables perception management. To hell with mentioning or lining out for the Undirected that there are alternatives or an opportunity cost.
So even in the most ideal case where all the hard work is done to make it so everyone, everywhere can magically remote sense the same data, I can't architectually guarantee a proof against perception management.
Let us now shift to the opposite side of the spectrum.
You only have your own eyes, and your only means of long range remote sensing is by dedicating other people to head over there and collect it, and report back. Magically assume everyone is okay with these individuals doing so with no strings attached. (That never happens, but lets's assume). Also assume these people are selfless and amazingly perfectly rerceptive with a talent for getting across aspects of what they see.
You end up at the same problem. The hand that sets the bounds or priorities of those people collecting information represents the true seat of power, and de facto perception management. In a centralized system, you'd confer godlike power over the lower rungs to the people at the top.
The only way I can see it working out in some modicum of a better way is to ensure distributed sourcing of prioritization decisions. I.e. localized populations of these metaphorical informational go getters, with priorities set as some function arrived at by the consuming population.
Then again, you run into the problem of our current media/press edifice: the audience picks the facts by collective editorial discretion, and furthermore, you emergently get meta-nodes that pop up and rate authoritativeness by how often similar renderings of the same inputs pop up. Those meta-nodes, and the consumers of information feed into an overall balancing act. The meta-nodes try to build audiences by tailoring the facts they provide for maximized odds of acceptance by their influenced audience.
So in no way do I find any way to reconcile a system that includes authoritative weighting that results in a low probability of perceptual management arising. It's an emergent property of any network medium of information propagation.
This suggests, given it's inevitability of arising, we need to thoughtfully structure something around, enshrining information propagation as a first order infrastructure (which we kind of already have), but also relegating some form of negative outcome to poor performance as a neutral information propagator, which again, we already have. People are starting to distrust media outlets and other authoritative sources due to the bad information received, just as Nation's are apparently placing the WHO's credibility at arms length due to their proven unwillingness to research theories that reflect poorly on their subject.
So yeah. We got what we've got, and with a blank slate we'll end up in the same place even with a massive change to the fundamental architecture of human social consciousness.
It seems to stem from some some deeper intrinsic instinctual underpinning of successful life forms that I"m not really good at imagining outside of.
A lot of words to say I don't know I guess, but I gave it the good old college try.
>But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, however I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information. If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless. Anyways, that's for self reported information. Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
> I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information.
Yeah, neither is good.
> If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless.
It’s worse than worthless, because you are expecting disinformation. Though to be fair you can also get disinformation from sources you trust...
> Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
That’s why it’s good to have inspectors. But even then, there are limits. Inspectors usually cannot go anywhere they please (otherwise nobody would sign that treaty), so it’s always possible to hide things from them.
Our governments have also the right to be critical when reading reports, particularly based on data from untrustworthy countries. We elect them to do their job, and that job involves quite a bit of critical thinking when dealing with other countries. They also have experts and often scientific cooperation agreements that can complement the WHO.
So yes, the WHO is imperfect. Perfecting it is quite difficult without causing countries to drop out, and countries should not be reliant on only one source anyway.
The problem is that the WHO appears to have more legitimacy and authority than they do. I have no problem with the WHO existing and doing their job but we have to accept they are bound by international politics. In developed countries we should rely on local medical bodies first.
That is definitely a problem; it tends to be seen either as the saviour of humanity or as a globalist evil. It is not perfect and not a substitute for proper public health policies.
WHO does seem like a bureaucratic mess, though. I read their situation reports from the beginning of the pandemic, and was surprised by how often they messed up. Links were wrong, random files went down, and they were released at seemingly random time points. Their press conferences were often hours late. And Tedros Adhanom praised China to an honestly embarrassing extent.
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
The WHO has shown itself to be practically useless. The premise that sovereign nations need the WHO to cooperate is false. Diplomacy and cooperation between nations was the norm for many years prior to the WHO and will be the norm for many years after the WHO’s inevitable abandonment and demise.
Do you have a concrete example of public health cooperation amongst more than 2 nations before WWII? As far as I remember, every country just covered its metaphorical arse during the Spanish Flu pandemic, for example.
Of course, cooperation is always possible, but what would be the extent of cooperation between say China, Russia, and the US if a new treaty were signed today?
Sure, if data from US would be enough to understand and fight disease. Otherwise, you need to create some sort of world health organization to share meaningful data and investigate inside all country participant without the appearance of [or actual] invasion of sovereignty.
Thus, we have the WHO. You wanna replace it, it's gonna take a decade to get to another agreement if one even is made. Then it will have its own set of issues. During a pandemic, seems better to me to work with and hold accountable the one we have... kinda like the WH is doing today.
We don't need it for this. Intelligence organizations know that biological threats like this are intelligence problems. They just didn't think them likely or that the sick guy would be our enemy.
However, now we know the adversary is truly an adversary. China will suppress information on pandemics started within its borders.
The game has changed. You don't listen to China about whether China is sick. You listen to Keyhole and your guys on the ground.
The WHO needs to be credible and trustworthy as an impartial source of truth otherwise it is not required.
Unfortunately this particular topic is heavily politically-loaded and CCP’s track record of handling the virus leads the common person to believe the WHO won’t receive the full information.
In this case the WHO’s hands seem tied. How are they supposed to fix that? (Genuine question, I would like the WHO to be able to fulfill its role well and serve the global public good)
Remember that time a high up WHO representative was asked about COVID in Taiwan and he faked the video call freezing and disconnected? Then remember when they got him back he was again asked about Taiwan and said they had already discussed China?
I remember thinking that the WHO wasn’t what it seemed. Just one small example of course.
This is a particularly generic bit of evidence, based on cynicism with a bit of directional truth about incentives. Do you have anything that draws this connection more directly?
Thanks. Site guidelines discourage comments like yours but I was definitely rapidly getting downvoted till you said something. Interesting stuff.
I don't think anything I said about the WHO is particularly controversial considering the last year and their disinformation campaign.
Anyway, bodies like the WHO can't be effective information sources because you get in trouble if a novel contagious disease started in your country. It has to lead to increased money flow to the diseased site at disease onset and decreased money flow to sites likely to risk creating novel disease.
That is, market pandemic bonds structured on a regional basis will probably yield a better indicator than the WHO.
You mean primary sources like the program that had US scientists embedded in Chinese laboratories that Trump dismantled in 2019?
Also, you clearly don’t understand what the WHO does and how critical it has been in the reduction and even eradication of disease spread across the world over decades.
Further, the WHO, much like most multilateral organizations is dependent on its member states for strength. When the most powerful member state voluntarily and unilaterally chose to disengage over the past half decade, it shouldn’t be surprised that the 2nd most powerful member state is calling the shots.
Okay, I'm happy to amend to "The WHO is useless for information on novel disease spread". That's what I intended anyway but clearly did not constrain the sentence correctly.
Yeah, I'm sure as a multilateral platform for cooperation on things that everyone wants done they're good.
But as an information source for novel epidemics, clearly we should use our spy sats.
How do we use our spy satellites for information about an epidemic?
I'm really struggling to understand what you're suggesting here. I'm aware there is a whole cottage industry of conspiracy theorists that point to satellite photos of busy parking lots outside hospitals in Hubei Province as evidence of earlier spread of Covid than has been officially acknowledged. But there's no way to distinguish a busy parking lot caused by a severe influenza outbreak (which existed prior to Covid in Hubei) and a novel pathogen.
If I remember rightly, the news articles about those US scientists embedded in Chinese laboratories eventually admitted about half-way in that they wouldn't have access to any more useful information on Covid-19 than the US already had. Which, of course, made the articles kind of pointless except as a way of stoking outrage amongst people who didn't care about little details like that.
Has the WHO really been that critical or are we ascribing successes to them that are really the result of business and technological innovation? At least in the recent decade or two, they seem to consistently be bad at their job and mired in politics. Even before the coronavirus there were issues like their failures in managing the Ebola outbreak (https://time.com/4123858/ebola-crisis-who-response-failure/).
I watched the WHO press briefings in about the first month.
If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
Taiwan, the country that arguably handled the virus best of all, did so well because they ignored the WHO and quickly closed their border, at the time when the WHO was insisting that countries do not restrict travel to/from China.
Mask early, serious lockdown as soon as it becomes serious, and don’t end lockdowns before numbers are way low. We masked late, put lockdowns in place late if at all, and ended them way too early, which means that some countries went through several ones. And we’re not through yet.
That said, I don’t share the optimism of the parent poster. This would be a heavy burden in terms of freedom and human rights for a result that is far from certain. There have been some resurgences, the extent of which is of course unknown because the truth would be damageable to China. And there is no knowing whether the next variant would start it all over again, in which it would be back to square one.
>> If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time.
Thank you for putting this stuff together. In the past, I did the same when people asked for "source?" for things like "Fauci and the HHS recommended against masking". After I go through the painful process of reacquiring each of the sources, these people disappear.
"Source?" is now the dual of the Gish Gallop strategy. It is a meta-rhetorical strategy to amplify work done by some perceived "opponent".
After all, for anyone who truly believes in sourced claims, they would say "I found these sources that do X. What have you found?" This is natural because they are more interested in the truth than in an argument against an "opponent".
So now I don't respond to disproportionate requests for work. I am glad you did, though. And looking through them, it's exactly as I remember: anti-mask advocacy.
I'll give credit to the WHO for not deleting their tweets. It would be even better if they offered a mea culpa explaining how they came to this position that was incorrect in hindsight. But not just disappearing things already is better than some others do.
Haha I mean the people disappear after firing off their "Source" calls. They're not really interested in sources. It's a technique to get you to waste your time.
Right, yes, that was early March. The guidelines evolved as more information became available and they released new advice in early April, which is far from ideal but better than a lot of governments reactions.
Their official stance before that was rigorous test, isolate, and trace, which was not done seriously anywhere outside China.
I was in China during the initial lockdown that started in late January/early February. The instructions from the government were clear from day one: stay home as much as possible, wear a mask when you go out, wash your hands when you get home, open your windows and keep your place well-ventilated. All that advice holds true today, just as it held true for SARS, MERS and other similar viruses.
I feel like the reporting from the WHO was deliberately sub-par for political reasons. For example the vacillating on masks - everyone knew that masks helped, but the WHO tried to be on the fence about it because some countries were experiencing shortages. Another example of the WHO playing politics was when they neglected to publish the advice not to trust folk remedies, since that would have gone against a Chinese government campaign to try softly promote TCM, perhaps as a form of psychological comfort to the hundreds of millions stuck in lockdown.
Living through corona has helped me to realize that successful public health policy isn't just about giving everyone the raw facts, it's also about managing people's morale and trying to influence their behavior through propaganda. I think the WHO tried to do this, but it wasn't universally successful.
There was a concerted effort from government officials,
bandwagon-joining academics (aided by journalists) in the West to downplay masking, and to ridicule and shame those who wore masks. Here is a Time article from eary March where it was described as the equivalent of “knocking on wood”. https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/
I am fairly certain that the US government reversed itself on masks before the WHO did (Wikipedia says WHO changed its advice in June).
Well, mask early may not have been the best choice of words then. Taiwan's reaction would qualify as early. And Taiwan is the thing that the WHO has been very conspicuously be silent about even when asked explicitly.
Most of those tweets were discouraging the use of masks for the purpose of protecting yourself from Covid. This still holds true today. At the time, a lot of people were hoarding masks, thinking it would protect themselves. Letting them continue wouldn't help control the spread, and probably would have increased the spread in hospitals.
I agree the fourth tweet has aged particularly terribly.
I’m not sure the federal government has the plenary power to enforce such things in the United States. So it was never an option. Authoritarian governments or single-state nations are better able to mandate behavior.
The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
> I’m not sure the federal government has the plenary power to enforce such things in the United States.
I am certain it hasn’t. But the same reasoning applies for state governments. Having public health decisions taken at the county level is sheer madness.
> The lockdowns, even as implemented, extracted an enormous toll on small businesses and mental health.
This is entirely true, and I hope this will make people and governments take health issues and depression more seriously. Now, we don’t have an alternative earth to experiment, but whether one strict lockdown for 6 months followed by progressive reopening is better or worse for people and the economy compared to a succession of waves and partial lockdowns with no end in sight should certainly be discussed.
This is even more skewed in countries that do not have a proper safety net and where people have the choice between going to work ill or not having a job.
I think it's more of a cultural difference rather than government one. Korea and Taiwan are democracies and managed to control the pandemic as well. The US government has the authority to declare martial law, but doing so would completely undermine people's faith in the government.
There is certainly a cultural element, but it is literally a legal difference as well. The federal government in the US does not have the same broad powers as the federal government in Korea. Remember the US is a collection of states that consented to let the feds take on certain powers while retaining many, whereas South Korea is “just” South Korea. Provincial autonomy in SK is not anything like the “state’s rights” issue in the US.
I am curious about this “pro-lockdown, pro-mask” advice from ethe WHO.
I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking. I also am fairly confident that the WHO was/is opposed to lockdowns and it certainly still opposes travel restrictions.
> I am almost certain that they took a long time to recommend masking.
They did. Initially they recommended testing and isolating (which obviously could not scale much). Their guidelines were still happily ignored as they were updated, though.
I remember that at the time when we were masking up in the Czech Republic (first half of march, maybe..?), WHO was actually talking a lot about the dangers of face masks when used too eagerly and improperly. Or at least that was what had gotten through our mainstream media.
In much of the world, people who wore masks were subject to ridicule, especially on social media because of the cynical public health messaging, which seemed to be about preserving stocks of masks for healthcare workers by telling the public that “masks don’t work” (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/opinion/coronavirus-face-...).
The New York Times op-ed above, and efforts from the Czech Republic made discussing public masking more acceptable in the US, and then the rest of the world.
Re: masks, you need to remember that China pretty much shut down all exports of PPE to keep it for domestic use. There wasn’t much more the rest of the world could have done to follow that directive. Even those of us that did have some stockpiled were asked to donate them to hospitals. Masks were hard to come by for a while until a cottage industry popped up to create second-rate masks.
I am actually very unhappy about this. I knew that masks were reusable. The advice against reuse explains why they are reusable under the right conditions.
But then I gave away my N95 mask stockpile (years old¹) in a moment of weakness because local medical personnel appealed on the Internet. I regret it entirely because I didn't want to do it, had concrete rational reasons not to do it, and then I felt bad when they appealed and did it anyway.
I really regret the emotional hijack. I'll never let it happen again. I just know they used those masks once and threw them away. Or maybe they used them zero times because they couldn't tell if they're safe because they're from the public. I really really regret it.
¹ Because CA sees wildfires everyone I know has boxes of these. And old ones are not supposed to be used either, but the only common failure mode over ten years isn't filtration, it's the elastic, which was fine on mine.
First: Calling the virus Chinese is racist.
Second: Trump is now gone.
Now: The virus might have come from a lab in China.
Summary: Playing politics harms all.
Politics. China is keen to not have the blame for COVID pinned on them. Accepting the blame makes Xi look weak and inept. It also opens up the door for countries to demand reparations. Meanwhile, every other country (especially the US) is eager to manufacture a narrative in which China eats the full blame for this because it absolves their politicians of responsibility for their complete mismanagement of the crisis. It sounds a lot better to say "we had a bioweapon unleashed against us and there was nothing we could do" than to say "this is just like the last 10 times we had a pandemic and we still botched our responses".
Surveillance and covert activity launched from the US and Western Europe is not done openly. If a US government agency discovered a US origin for covid-19 tomorrow, do you seriously think you'd hear about it, or that it would ever be reported in a mainstream media outlet? If it escaped from a US lab, they knew it at the time, and had no way of stopping domestic spread, do you think that US agencies would be above covertly also releasing it in Wuhan as cover, and getting Chinese assets to report about suspicious deaths on social media? China is secretive about important things, and the West is secretive about important things.
To be clear, these scenarios are entirely and spontaneously made up, but they're also entirely possible, and we've fallen into the trap of believing any old bullshit about China simply because it's possible, and reconciling our spreading it and our obvious ignorance with racist "inscrutable Chinese" tropes.
The reason we don't know more about China is not because they're quiet, the reason we don't know about China is because we ban and censor media coming from China (just as they do to us, but moreso.) Somehow it's become mainstream to believe that the public shouldn't know what the Chinese government thinks (or the Russian government, or the Iranian government) and that it's better to rely on rumor and retired generals.
The domestic narrative in China is that the virus is of foreign origin, with the CCP press strongly suggesting that it's of US origin - eg:[1].
The truth probably is that they know it originated (from animals) in China, and don't want the WHO to officially reach that conclusion. That's not particularly damaging to most countries, but in a communist country with tightly controlled information flow, the citizenry isn't shown a government making mistakes.
> Dwyer says that the team didn’t see anything during its visits to suggest a lab accident. “Now, whether we were shown everything? You can never know. The group wasn’t designed to go and do a forensic examination of lab practice.”
> Even in the best of circumstances, a full inquiry could take months, if not longer. The team must also navigate attempts by China to politicize the inquiry.
And yet a few days ago the WHO pushed out a hasty judgment that it was very unlikely the virus leaked from the lab. And in the last day they’ve already started backtracking after intense skepticism from the world - see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/who-backs... titled “ WHO Backs Away From Outright Rejection of Virus Lab-Leak Theory”.
> The Chinese scientists also acknowledged they had discovered that 92 people were hospitalized in Wuhan as early as October 2019 with symptoms such as fever and coughing. The Chinese experts said they had found no trace of Covid-19 in those people, but the tests were incomplete. The W.H.O. team members said more research was needed.
Between the CCP’s early suppression of journalism and social media reporting on the virus, the fact that Taiwan was the first to warn the world, China’s repeated denials and delays in letting an outside team to visit the site, and their purge of all the coronavirus studies originating from this lab (https://www.the-sun.com/news/2113876/covid-cover-up-china-wu...), there is very little reason to trust the claim that a lab leak can be ruled out. If anything it only seems more likely that a massive coverup is in progress, and the WHO is the willing mouthpiece for it.
That the Chinese eat bats? Or that this was a lab leak?
Because it obviously cannot be both!
But yet, all the racist white people of the world, and yes, they were all white people, were accusing the Chinese of being disgusting and eating bats.
The western world claims that they are multicultural, and not racist, but yet, this one thing caused them to show their true racist colors.
Surprisingly, no normal white people, came to the defense and shouted down the racists among them. Thus validating the fact, that their silence meant that they supported all the racist vitriol that came out from their fellow brethren.
The truth hurts. I know. I expect that my comment will be flagged and censored.
I've seen papers from several scientists who believe that SARS-CoV-2 had laboratory origins. You can find them on Google Scholar or similar search engines, but you cannot post them to HN or Twitter because they get instantly censored.
The evidence against laboratory origins seems flimsy to me as well. The most cited paper says because the virus infects humans suboptimally it must not be lab grown in human cells. Also they examined the "only" 3 relevant features of the virus and determined they evolved naturally from other SARS strains. Not exactly convincing.
I don't know either way, but the claim that the virus escaped from a lab is hardly outrageous. It is well within the sphere of possibilities that are worth examining. Lab leaks have happened before.
Why would you think that we would have to do that? It's only people who are being threatened that have to talk their way out of it. It's not only easy to casually threaten China, it's required to avoid charges of being a secret agent sent to destroy American unity.
If this wasn’t from the lab, or a bad actor set it up to look like it was, to me it’s enough of a coincidence to basically conclude we live in a simulation.
It's bizarre that Reuters thought that this preprint was fit to report on. 8 months later, it still hasn't passed peer review. If a Mar 2019 introduction in Spain were real, they would have found more cases and been able to sequence them, instead of just getting a little blip on a super-sensitive assay.
Again, they didn't (or failed to) sequence the virus to prove it was in the samples, and their antibody data (fig 1) doesn't make any sense. IgM antibodies are acute and IgG longer-lasting, so they should appear more like a cumulative distribution if there was a real outbreak. They didn't test their antibody assay for cross-reactivity to seasonal coronaviruses, so that's probably what's going on here.
Same story for the American study (https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...), though Forbes was at least minimally competent enough to quote a scientist's tweet pointing out the limitations, and the authors even address "potential cross reactivity with human common coronavirus infection". Only 1 sample, from 10 Jan 2020, was positive across all their antibody tests, and no samples were sequenced! These studies all fail to properly account for the false positive rate of their assays, and then pretend that all the positive hits are SARS-CoV-2 without any orthogonal verification.
It will take generations before China will recover from the Wuhan virus outbreak. However it happened, because of the CCP suppressing facts, people, and information, the harm to any credibility the Chinese government had is gone for some time. This could have been the China century, but for generations there will always be that doubt.
I can’t answer that question, because there is no dependable, verifiable factual data, On Chinese recovery whatsoever. It has already been established that nothing can be trusted coming from the government, and since the news is owned by the government, and only broadcast with the government approves, absolutely everything that comes out of China should be taken with a grain of salt. The only thing that can be ascertained is observational,
We know that China made a mess of the first phase of the pandemic. There was a huge new years party in Wuhan and an uncontrolled outbreak. That was in the news at the time, but someone then put the story about a lab excursion out which is probably untrue and this has been a key focus of discussions since.
To me this is like a magician distracting the audiences attention from the gold penny - you are all looking in the wrong place while the real issue is being forgotten.
Um I shared analysis 15 days ago from a doctor who did an in-depth analysis and determined it to be from a lab. My post got one comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25965751
Disclaimer: I didn't read much of the analysis you linked. I'm not a virologist, but I do have a PhD in Bayesian Statistics.
As a general rule, I don't take this kind of analysis via repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated repeated application of Bayes' Rule with somewhat-to-completely arbitrary probabilities at each step very seriously. At all.
It's a kind of gish gallop [1] with additional window dressing purporting to wrap it all up into one easy number. From a probabilistic point of view it ignores any dependency between observed facts, which is a serious issue but not necessarily the most damning one.
This particular case is even worse than usual. According to a quick Ctrl-F-aided skim of the document, the author doesn't identify a single fact that increases the probability of zoonotic origin, which is extremely suspicious. If every single available fact in a complicated issue points to the same conclusion that's probably because you are messing with your facts, not because that's how things actually are.
After noticing the one-sided-ness of the Bayesian updates I rolled my eyes and closed the tab.
Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk — akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said.
The author is CEO of ATOS Therapeutics. He has invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals which have helped over 80 million people. He has been cities over 9,000 in various works. I heard his company's breast cancer treatment had a major win last week - phase 2 so successful that it's being halted and moved immediately to phase 3. I don't think it's fair to put his work in the YouTube loon bucket.
> phase 2 so successful that it's being halted and moved immediately to phase 3
Doesn't that sound super fishy to you, too good to be true, doesn't sound like it would be legal if you think about it for a second, that sort of thing?
Substantial peer feedback has been received that this record does not follow the norms of scientific rigour or balance, and thus the main claims may not stand the test of scientific scrutiny.
Now maybe the virus mutated from those initial 174 cases but that's unlikely.
China does have a narrative that covid19 reinfections are coming from imported frozen foods though so I'm not sure why they are pushing that angle. It's probably an economic one and to save face. But maybe it's real.. if it is we are screwed.
I don't feel convinced by the argument. Maybe someone can help me understand better.
- Virus infects human ACE2 suboptimally, therefore it's not lab grown. Why? Because a virus engineer is always going for maximizing spread rate? Seems plausible that less-than-ideal infection rates of humans could be a feature rather than a bug.
- A polybasic clevage site was not seen in SARS-CoV... but it's function is not known. Okay?
- The virus backbone was "0day" and not previously known to researchers. Seems like a feature that a covert bio warfare lab would desire.
The rest of the speculation seems to ride on the assumption that the virus originated in China (despite evidence showing otherwise[1][2]), and their discovery seems biased toward any data to support that conclusion.
>Why? Because a virus engineer is always going for maximizing spread rate? Seems plausible that less-than-ideal infection rates of humans could be a feature rather than a bug.
You are correct. There is both gain of function and loss of function happening in these types of experiments.
Firstly that was in March. Secondly it discounts the serial passage research which leaves little genetic evidence. All the potential sources are unlikely, so why discount a lab accident?
I think the WHO did a fine job of writing it up. The US motive for proving China is at fault is largely political diversion from the US' mishandling, which would be mishandling no matter what origin.
That China blocked the Who's efforts and the WHO disclosed this is more relevant to future health policy than where this particular outbreak started. (Do we really want the public health system to tune to this specific scenario?)
> The US motive for proving China is at fault is largely political diversion from the US' mishandling, which would be mishandling no matter what origin.
Whether this is motivation is true or not has nothing to do with whether the WHO report reflects reality.
The WHO disclosed they were blocked. You can infer a bayesian for a lab release of this specific virus. Now what does that change about the next pandemic?
> That China blocked the Who's efforts and the WHO disclosed this is more relevant to future health policy than where this particular outbreak started.
(Obviously the WHO, like any part of the UN can do nothing but document anything a superpower refuses to do.)
Now how does that build a case that the WHO is a problem instead of allowing superpowers to have super power is a problem?
It seems to me like people down voting my original comment are members of superpower states with hypocritical stances.
Note Lord Acton (also from a state listed there) states the meaning of that list in the context of the UN system:
“All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Now, what has the WHO done wrong vs what is outside the abilities of any part of the UN to address?
I will summarize my very simple position again:
The WHO did a good write-up, if you want to look beyond what a UN organization is allowed to do then do your own inference.
You seem to be implying the WHO should do something else that is consistent with its position and the fact that choices by China and the US are beyond its control. Maybe you can elaborate on what that is?
If you are suggesting a reform to allow a UN organization to force these nations to not be a global threat in every area, including health, then I'm happy to hear it.
My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them.
Which is exactly what this issue is about.
That's not to say we have compelling evidence that this was a lab virus, either. I think, for me, it's a, "we don't know, but I wouldn't be shocked at all if it was a lab virus".