> Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.
> It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.
At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out.
The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed.
Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.
You won't have to wait long for confirmation. The Director of National Intelligence will be required by law to declassify information about the infected researchers on June 18th, including their names, symptoms, date of onset and role at WIV.[1]
I discounted the article, especially the below part because anyone can say they're "100%" certain about something while they're not.
> When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
...
That's until I saw that Act on Congress' website. It'll be interesting to see what information is declassified. If there's proof that the mentioned scientists were first to fall ill, I wonder what the consequences are.
That would look bad diplomatically. It’s one thing to make up an excuse before going. It’s another thing to cancel in the middle and leave. Not sure what would be accomplished by this.
Assuming DNI chooses to divulge that tidbit formally. Per Biden's published interpretation of that law, they can withhold anything on grounds of 'national security' (note not the narrower 'sources and methods' scope).
National Security being anything that can be deemed dangerous to the Executive Branch. A very broad stroke these days, that's even used to paint opposing politicians by both parties.
At the moment I’m skeptical of how revelatory the report and documents will be. The act specifically mentions the possibility of redactions to protect sources and methods. We’ll have to wait and see what size of bus the DNI attempts to drive through that hole.
Yeah, that was the wrong word. At the moment I’m skeptical of how much value it will have as far as confirming or refuting this article for the aforementioned reason.
Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.
My Aunt was killed by the flu. She had a pre-existing unknown heart-condition and despite her healthy lifestyle the flu weakened her heart enough that she needed a heart-transplant in her early 20s. She died at age 27.
I tell this story whenever it is possible, to educate people about what the flu is capable of doing, whenever someone says the flu is "no big deal." Statistically, perhaps not. Unless you're the statistic that is.
Having had a number of bad colds before I actually got a bad flu, I always thought my colds were the flu. Not a huge deal. When it was confirmed to be the flu when I talked to her later, the mobile doctor said that many people think the same because they tupically don't go to the doctor for confirmation, if the doctor even chooses to test.
A real (non-covid) flu had me feeling like I was on death's door for a week, and much of that time was spent wishing it would take me.
I got H1N1. The only reason I didn’t end up in a hospital was because I forced myself to stay hydrated and somewhat lucid when I wasn’t able to sleep. It was really bad.
I got a type-A flu this year in early January, and holy shit was it painful, I hadn't been that sick in 25 years. Some co-workers and relatives also got it (in opposite sides of the Earth!) and reported the same, this year the flu was really strong.
In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).
> In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).
I can attest that somewhere between vaccines, potential acquired immunity and variants having reduced strength, my pair of confirmed Covid experiences (March 2020, July 2022) went from "the sickest I've ever felt, with symptoms recurring for months and persistent-to-present reduced smell capability" to "a mild cold".
Just for anecdata, I had the J&J vaccine early on, then the bivalent booster when it became available. In January, I got COVID, and I was "sickest I've ever felt" for about three days, "bad cold" for a week, "fatigue and brain fog" for another week, and "smoker's cough in the morning" for several months afterward.
I also had a very bad flu in early Jan2020.
I'm typically very strong but my body was sapped of energy for 5 days and was different than any other sickness I've experienced.
They are replying directly to a tangential comment that someone else made. It might not be relevant to this overall thread, but it's relevant to this particular comment chain.
Except, of course, we don't know who they were, let alone whether they were otherwise healthy or whether they were young adults. Whether somebody is confident in your guesses is up to them I guess.
According to US government sources, they were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. Ben Hu was the researcher who lead “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses at WIV.
1. They made a mistake in the lab, exposing themselves to a virus (not covid-19)
2. That virus was non-human-transmissible
3. The exposure happened 1-several weeks before the actual start of covid-19 at the market
That's not impossible, especially if the lab was sloppy and (1) happened fairly regularly.
Given the early concentration of cases around the market, and the detection of covid-19 on market materials, the lab-leak coincidence seems to be:
1. They made a mistake in the lab, exposing themselves to covid-19
2. They nearly-immediately went to the market, and spent significant time there to get the place loaded up with the virus
3. They didn't go much of anywhere else
4. They didn't interact much with others at the lab
That's not impossible either, but I don't see that lab-leak scenario appears much more likely than the non-lab-leak scenario.
> 2. They nearly-immediately went to the market, and spent significant time there to get the place loaded up with the virus
Wouldn't it be enough to just go there, buy some food, caugh on a few of the workers there, and they'd spread the thing around to other shoppers in the next few days?
2 was meant to be in coordination with 3 -- the initial outbreak was at the market, so the researchers need to do two things: go to the market enough to infect people there, and not go other places to infect people elsewhere.
Could you remind us what the "non-lab-leak scenario" is again?
To be clear, is your "likeliness" determined on whether we can find a creature that is more similar to covid than RaTG13 (we haven't) or something else?
The non lab leak scenario is just what it historically has been for ~70% of all viruses that we can trace (and probably the remainder as well, but we have no evidence): zoonotic jump.
The lab-leak scenario presumes zoonotic jump, too. Just rather than from something in the wild, it's from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice, which WIV was known to be using to study SARS-like Coronaviruses.
The coronaviruses being studied at WIV included RaTG13, one of the closest relatives (96.1% genomic match) to SARS-CoV-2 ever found in the wild.
But a key difference between SARS-CoV-2 and it's wild relatives is the spike protein with affinity for the ACE2 receptor, so it would have had to have evolved through an intermediate host with a human-like ACE2 receptor. For example, ACE2-transgenic lab mice.
This does not itself rule out the wild-origin theory, but no wild host that could explain the missing link from RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2 has yet been found.
Indeed. So the only reasonable conclusion so far is that we haven't found the reservoir host yet. This may take a while and it may even never happen. If and when we do we will finally be able to make another step in this whole saga.
> If there was GoF being done on the sample (adding of the spike protein to infect humans), that could be the remaining percentage.
I do not believe one bit the only "reasonable conclusion" is it has to be from nature.
Between the lab sample, the outbreak area, the GoF program being run, the timing, history of lab leaks, and the reaction, a lab leak is very reasonable...
I think there may have been a slight misunderstanding here (I'm not particularly familiar with this topic so I may have some concepts mistaken):
> The lab-leak scenario presumes zoonotic jump, too. Just rather than from something in the wild, it's from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice
> So the only reasonable conclusion so far is that we haven't found the reservoir host yet.
> I do not believe one bit the only "reasonable conclusion" is it has to be from nature.
If it's discovered that the reservoir host was a mouse in a lab at WIV then "we will finally be able to make another step in this whole saga" in the same way as it being discovered as a wild host. It might be worth reading their comment again.
(Again, I'm not deeply familiar with this topic and may be totally off base; gluing together my personal understanding of the meanings of these words has me arriving at this conclusion. I'm also attempting to clarify someone else's statements so take another grain of salt for that.)
Zoonotic would mean it was a natural occurrence. The GoF program of adding the spike protein to attach to the ACE2 receptor and putting it in a mouse would NOT be zoonotic, but lab made. It's a lab mouse. Not a jump, but a deliberate placement in a lab.
Obviously the implications matter whether it occurred in nature or deliberately by man. If it was the latter, then the program that was supposed to prepare against the potential of a natural virus actually made something that may never have happened, and then went on to kill millions.
It sounds like the claim is that it’s “from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice“. I assume “humanized” is referring to the genome or something else about the genetics but these organisms still shouldn’t be considered humans (or at least this opinion seems reasonable; if it’s factually wrong I’m open to being corrected).
But if it’s “from” non-human “to” human, isn’t that a zoonotic jump, or is there some mistake in this understanding?
Thanks for the explanations. Admittedly, my introduction to the term “zoonotic” was from playing Plague Inc: Evolved (if one is not familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_Inc:_Evolved) so you might see where I’m coming from. I do roughly understand this to be the meaning.
Interesting. I noticed that one of my kids picked up a lot about how electricity works as well as simple and/or/not/nand gates. But that doesn't mean he knows anything about electricity, merely how the game logic presents it, which is close but not quite how it really works. That doesn't mean he knows nothing either, but it does mean that such knowledge should always be verified with proper sources to ensure you're not accidentally learning something isn't quite true.
Yeah, I have difficulty with this, in particular trusting sources. Wikipedia is almost always correct on a technical level but very information dense (Good Thing! Recently I looked up “captain obvious disambiguation” for a joke and learned the word “lapalissade”) so it sometimes requires a certain mindset to learn from there. Some public school teachers don’t like being questioned(!!) and I think that’s caused me to have an internalized skepticism of academics, ironically despite the likelihood they’re more informed. Rando stranger on the internet can be good source but maybe a bullshitter instead.
On the whole, and especially in particular if one pays attention, people here tend to make “good faith” statements such that a difference of opinion similar to this thread is genuinely informative if one is willing to consider the possibility of any particular thing being true (or not). It helps to understand the difference between statements of fact and opinion. I’ve found it helps also to be open about a lack of knowledge if one is willing to ask questions and “be taught” in a fashion, despite the reputation that such leading statements have.
I try to remind myself that all topics which are able to capture academics’ attention have a lot of depth to them, practically by necessity. My physics teacher in high school was fantastic so I have a solid understanding of the concepts taught in that class -- in my experience, MKS logic has been a helpful mental exercise for understanding any abstraction. But it would still take years of study for me to really understand the things we can’t explain about the physical world. And that’s true of almost anything. Best to keep an open mind.
That turned into a bit more than I expected. I appreciate your comment, if it’s not already obvious! I hope you have a nice day, whenever you read this.
Except that’s not true. Chinese culture is different.
"There is no culture of staying at home for minor symptoms," he said. "When people feel sick they all go to hospitals, which may easily crash the healthcare system."
Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific.
So the idea that all of these researchers would have contracted Covid and present with symptoms specific/indicative of Covid is absurd. The chances of that must be infinitesimally small.
If they had the typical, flu- and cold-like symptoms that most people experience, why would anyone ever even notice? It's extremely common to have illnesses with these symptoms in an office environment, to the point it would be strange if they didn't.
> "Importantly, Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults. In the vast majority of adults, the symptoms are mild and nonspecific."
I've had Covid three times (March '20, December '20, August '22) and as a healthy middle-aged adult, I'm not sure I'd agree.
The first two times were pretty wretched: I was sick enough that I could barely eat or get out of bed for a week or so, and it was many weeks before I felt completely recovered. The third time (after getting vaccinated) was definitely milder and I recovered much more quickly, but was still pretty ill for a couple of days.
But notably, the symptoms for me were quite different from a typical 'flu. One thing that was very distinctive/specific for me was the wild changes in taste perception: I couldn't even eat some foods that I normally like due to them tasting so bad. I struggled to brush my teeth because I couldn't taste the mint flavour in toothpaste, only bitter chemicals!
Of course, it's fair to say that it doesn't affect everyone equally: some of my friends and family had similar experiences to me while others only had fairly mild symptoms.
> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults
Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this:
"After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period.
Healthy children and young adults have been exposed to an extremely small risk during the peak of the epidemic, which would normally be deemed an acceptable part of life. Risks can be far higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions."
"Data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today.
His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between 7 March and 26 June 2020."
If you're claiming that, for instance, those aged under 40 without any comorbidities were at significantly higher risk of dying due to the impact of Covid-19 I think it would be good to post a reference for that.
The CDC publishes data showing causes of death by age cohort[0], it's worth looking at for the year 2020. Apparently they're still working on the 2021 figures.
The short version: Covid-19 just isn't a random killer - and certainly not of otherwise healthy under 40s - that everyone thinks it is/thought it was.
These numbers show that the number of deaths observed is beyond the sum of reported covid deaths + expected deaths from all other sources. Which indicates either that many covid deaths were misclassified as something else, or that the strain on the health system caused by covid resulted in significantly more deaths. If deaths were misclassified, it is certainly possible that some percentage of people in their 40s or 50s died of Covid, with cause of death listed as something else.
It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.
In England, a new weekly set of figures will also be published, showing the number of deaths that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Deaths that occur after 60 days will also be added to this figure if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate. This will provide an additional measure of the impact of the disease over time.
This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates
The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.
> The earliest strains of Covid were by far the most severe ones. It's not that surprising to me that the very first patients contracted a strain more likely to put them in the hospital.
No, the only SARS-Cov-2 strain with (likely) decreased mortality is Omicron, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2
The fact that Covid (as an illness) has become milder is due to the hosts adapting, not the virus being milder.
Not only the hosts, but also the hospitals. Treatments became available, and we learned what worked well and what didn't. The care a person who is infected today gets is very different from what people in the first months of the pandemic got and that's improved outcomes.
That's part of it. The other part is that once the weakest individuals in the population have died the remainder will be stronger on average and so they may be able to deal with infection that much better.
> "In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta."
Not my experience! OG Covid (March 2020) was just as severe as alpha/beta (December 2020). My most recent infection (August 2022) was much milder, but that could also be explained by being vaccinated.
I don't disagree with your linked comment. But my personal experience, not to mention the high level of hospitalisation and mortality at the time which resulted in the first UK lockdown, disagrees with your "Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta." statement, if "Vanilla" was the variant circulating in the UK in March 2020.
My understanding is that newer strains aren't much different in terms of severity, but the hospitalization and mortality rates will change by some percentage because our treatment protocols improved. When covid first hit, people had no idea what to do with the infected. Doctors around the world were sharing information and research was underway but they all had to learn as they went along. Eventually things were bound to improve, even if the virus hadn't evolved at all.
COVID is only BSL-3. China has over 100 of those, so the odds of a city center being near a lab is much higher.
If COVID had an incubation period of a 1-2 weeks, it's also possible for the outbreak to occur in a city center that is not a likely location for human/bat/animal interactions, so the percentage will increase further.
The WIV has BSL-4, BSL-3 and BSL-2 labs. But the research involving insertion of human specific furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses sampled in the wild was done in BSL2 which just means a thin medical mask and gloves. https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
> Infectious material used in procedures with a potential for creating aerosols or splashes, or used in high concentrations or large volumes, must be handled in an annually certified biosafety cabinet.
Realistically, many people's bayesian priors are severely skewed against the lab leak hypothesis because it is associated with Donald Trump, and even intelligent people find it difficult to separate the message from the messenger.
Even if they had done it in the BSL-4 parts, the french partners in the facility actually left it after they saw how poorly the bsl-4 was implemented, only one French researcher stayed.
<<NOTE: Deadline.>> Not later than 90 days after the date of the
enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall--
(1) declassify any and all information relating to potential
links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of
the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), including--
(A) activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of
Virology with or on behalf of the People's Liberation
Army;
(B) coronavirus research or other related activities
performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to
the outbreak of COVID-19; and
(C) researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such
researcher--
(i) the researcher's name;
(ii) the researcher's symptoms;
(iii) the date of the onset of the
researcher's symptoms;
[[Page 137 STAT. 5]]
(iv) the researcher's role at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology;
(v) whether the researcher was involved with
or exposed to coronavirus research at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology;
(vi) whether the researcher visited a hospital
while they were ill; and
(vii) a description of any other actions taken
by the researcher that may suggest they were
experiencing a serious illness at the time; and
(2) <<NOTE: Reports.>> submit to Congress an unclassified
report that contains--
(A) all of the information described under paragraph
(1); and
(B) only such redactions as the Director determines
necessary to protect sources and methods.
Regardless of that, we already know they were doing related biological weapons research, as part of a cooperative program with the US.
Funny how congress isn’t focusing on the stuff they have direct jurisdiction over, like refusing to fund similar programs in the future unless there is additional oversight.
That's a bit misleading. The US via EcoHealth was funding virus research for disease prevention. The Wuhan lab may have been doing weapons research but that's a bit unproven.
People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility spaces, rather than absolutely.
If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.
Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious ramifications to the political systems of the two largest economies in the world (the US and China).
What are the chances that we'll ever hear the true story?
Which isn't a suggestion that "They're covering {specific thing} up." It's a suggestion that we will never hear evidence of any of the possible outcomes.
And beyond that, what would "the truth" in this case change?
>> Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”
Yes, the national and global conversations would have been substantially worse and less effective.
Once the cat's out of the bag with a global pandemic, any breath blaming its origin is wasted.
Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?
> If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses.
Not at all. The chances are that if it was a lab leak the people involved had no idea the leak happened at all. That's how lab leaks work: people make mistakes and inadvertently leak stuff from the lab. eg: Karen Wetterhahn vs lead
What you're talking about is a deliberate release from a lab, which would have eyewitnesses because they know what is happening and see it happening and can corroborate the reports of other witnesses. eg: Thomas Midgley Jr vs lead
In Dr. Wetterhahn's case, it wasn't a leak and it wasn't lead. It was a spill that was contained properly and she followed all known procedures at the time. But it wasn't known at the time that dimethylmercury could penetrate through the gloves in less than 15 seconds. The estimated amount she absorbed through her gloves was roughly 0.089 teaspoons or 0.44ml (less than a drop) of dimethylmercury.
That was enough to kill her. No one else was exposed.
If she had prioritized herself over cleaning up, she may have survived.
I don't think that we would have done anything differently if we knew that China was responsible. It wouldn't have changed our treatments or vaccination strategies or anything. Could it have made some people who are crazy against China feel differently? Maybe. I don't think it would have made the doofuses who took ivermectin act differently though.
"Ivermectin: an award-winning drug with expected antiviral activity against COVID-19... with demonstrated antiviral activity against a number of DNA and RNA viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)"
Whether or not ivermectin ultimately turned out to be efficacious against Covid19 is not the main point, it was/is a widely known, completely safe, anti-viral, and while everything else in the toolbag was being thrown at Covid19, ivermectin was a good candidate, especially since it showed positive results in some clinical conditions. (and I've heard it pointed out that in order to get profitable approval for experimental mRNA vaccines to be released, there was a huge financial incentive to declare a priori that ivermectin did not work)
If you "believe in science" you wouldn't call people who tried ivermectin "doofuses", doing so you're simply looking in the doofus mirror.
It's best not to join one partisan camp or the other and politicize science, but look at evidence. Ivermectin has well known antiviral properties, and coronavirus is a virus.
> I don't think that we would have done anything differently if we knew that China was responsible
you are fixating on the wrong aspect. Whether or not covid19 is the result of the leak of "man-made" gain-of-function research is extremely important to what we do in the future. The public has a right to know.
you keep arguing your own point here, that "no harm is no foul and we wouldn't have done anything differently so we don't need to look" and to me that's simply you saying you support the politics that played out and you don't want to look at it. To me, science was ignored in favor of politics and it's all exactly what I want to look at.
I just don't buy the international conspiracy to block ivermectin. I've considered it and discussed it with my poor father who became convinced by Fox News and endless Facebook forwarded postings. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of drugs and substances that have an antiviral effect. Ivermectin was one that was tested and there were some early results that were positive but then later with more thorough testing it didn't appear as efficacious. There are plenty of other drugs that were also promoted as blocking COVID, that lupus drug. It became a conservative conspiratorial fantasy that there was a widespread governmental attempt to block them from using other things than coronavirus vaccines. My father went out and found alternative sources for these substances. Fortunately he never took any of them.
I do think knowing the actual source of COVID is good information to have.
People were blocked from getting ivermectin prescriptions. Doctors were told not to write them. Pharmacies were told not to fill them. There was no conspiracy. It was done completely openly. It was just decided by "the scientists" and effectively banned from the mainline medical system. Any doctor working in a network healthcare system (most of them) was basically told they could not prescribe it.
Given it's long history and safety, why was this necessary? Much is learned in medicine by practitioners trying things and sharing their results amongst each other.
And if they did, they'd lose their license. Which would happen because there sure were a lot of people who were super happy to dime out anybody breaking covid rules.
It astounds me how so many people continue to buy into the mainstream covid narrative. It just doesn't make any sense. Just doesn't add up. It never did.
> I just don't buy the international conspiracy to block ivermectin.
I agree, there is no conspiracy. It is just that when scientists, journalists and public servants are usually on the same side of the political spectrum, there is no need to central coordination (conspiracy). Society seems more polarized than recent times which leads to greater uniformity of ideas on each side.
Regarding Ivermectin, though the evidence was flimsy, it got quickly identified by one side as a problem because it put at risk some core beliefs on how to combat the pandemic (lockdowns, forced vaccination, sanitary passes). Even though the evidence for some of these beliefs were also flimsy or speculative.
The evidence was flimsy that vaccinations prevented trasmission of the disease, but that didn't stop all the "experts" spreading damaging misinformation about it though. Therefore evidence was not among the criteria that governed their decision making, so their decisions about ivermectin must have been motivated by something else.
> Our results demonstrate that vaccinations reduce susceptibility to infection as well as infectiousness, which should be considered by policy makers when seeking to understand the public health impact of vaccination against transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
> The SAR [secondary attack rate] in household contacts exposed to the delta variant was 25% (95% CI 18–33) for fully vaccinated individuals compared with 38% (24–53) in unvaccinated individuals.
> SAR was 35% and 23% for unvaccinated and vaccinated delta variant exposed contacts, respectively. SAR was 44% and 41% for unvaccinated and vaccinated omicron exposed contacts, respectively. Booster dose immunisation of contacts or vaccination of index cases reduced SAR of vaccinated omicron variant exposed contacts.
> For outpatients, there is currently low‐ to high‐certainty evidence that ivermectin has no beneficial effect for people with COVID‐19. Based on the very low‐certainty evidence for inpatients, we are still uncertain whether ivermectin prevents death or clinical worsening or increases serious adverse events, while there is low‐certainty evidence that it has no beneficial effect regarding clinical improvement, viral clearance and adverse events. No evidence is available on ivermectin to prevent SARS‐CoV‐2 infection.
> The evidence suggests that ivermectin does not reduce mortality risk and the risk of mechanical ventilation requirement. Although we did not observe an increase in the risk of adverse effects, the evidence is very uncertain regarding this endpoint.
> It is just that when scientists, journalists and public servants are usually on the same side of the political spectrum, there is no need to central coordination (conspiracy).
The last time this happened we created the Nuremberg Code.
I'll never forget how inhumanely some people were treated and how little some truly care for bodily autonomy. The coercion and gaslighting from all directions has been nauseating. The trust I lost in so many institutions wont be replaced anytime soon, perhaps ever.
What would a modern day Nuremberg trial look like?
> Firstly, it is important to note that the drug was only tested in vitro using a single line of monkey kidney cells engineered to express human signaling lymphocytic activation molecule (SLAM), also known as CDw150, which is a receptor for the measles virus
> Also, ivermectin has not been tested in any pulmonary cell lines, which are critical for SARS-CoV-2 in humans
> Furthermore, these authors did not show whether the reduction seen in RNA levels of SARS-CoV-2 following treatment with ivermectin would indeed lead to decreased infectious virus titers.
> Importantly, the drug concentration used in the study (5 μM) to block SARS-CoV-2 was 35-fold higher than the one approved by the FDA for treatment of parasitic diseases
"demonstrated" is doing a lot of lifting in that abstract given those caveats (and there's several more pages of caveats and "could", "maybe", "might", "may" hedging after those.)
Some of them said that. Many of them explicitly told the public that masks wouldn't help. However impeccable your motives for doing so, lying to the public should destroy your credibility.
> I mean, to be fair -- they said we needed to conserve all the masks we had for medical staff because they had no idea what was coming.
Its also worth noting that this was the direct result of off-shoring manufacturing to China, who could then threaten to withhold delivery of new PPE if they continued to pursuit the lab leak theory at the same time they were curtailing protests in Hong Kong and disspearing physicians who were speaking out about the severity of COVID and implementing their zero COVID policy and physically barricading people in their homes or comically netting them on the street.
I think HN has a this terrible need to play 'but my guy/source is more trust worthy because of X' the truth is all sides have an agenda, what I think is not in question is how revealing it was how little they respect the intelligence of the general public in what was thought to be a dire health crisis.
That's the ONLY real take away, sitting here and trying to distract from this fact, is the stark realization that there is a direct funding source for GoF viral studies provided by the NIH [0] shows that no party is innocent here.
In addition to that the CCP didn't allow investigations to take place effectively from the international community, and the subsequent floods that happened in Wuhan in 2020 ensured that the truth will likely never be known which is the best resolution to what is likely a complete debacle of epic proportions as plausible deniability and saber rattling in the Taiwan straight and the Russian invasion of Ukraine were enough to sweep things under the rug.
I unlike e rest of my friends worked in the health sciences, and to be honest I was the first to mention in my circle of friends that this was likely an unitentional lab leak situation I got the stink eye; it was because I saw what was happening in November in Hong Kong in '19 during the aftermath of the protests in the Summer that had escalated in intensity and were leading what was outright revolution as momentum increased. The Bird flu epidemic overwhelmed and devastated the medical system in HK and the CCP knew that (it was overrun by ill mainlanders) used that very real trauma and weaponized it in order force people to stop te protests in order to pass the NSL, jail dissidents and then weaponized zero COVID as a policy to illegally annex Hong Kong in direct violation of the hand-over and international law.
What was worse is the CCP forced the borders open during covid fir and used mainlanders as vectors for Chinese nationals into HK (and blatantly ignored or outright purposely spread infection) further prolonging and increasing infection rates needed to justify these measures in what was an unprecedented and alarming show of display as Lam and the police followed a more PLA playbook to handling the domestic situation.
Furthermore, the exiled virologist (Dr. Li-Meng Yan) who worked on at the WIV but was scrubbed fled the mainland and came out about the GoF work she had done there, but sadly because she was platformed by Trump affiliates her claims and work were disregarded showing how divisive and polarizing people were on this matter, despite the fact that the physician who spoke out about COVID early on died a terrible and painful death because the CCP wanted to make an example of him. This was wen clubhouse let mainlanders use a more open platform to communicate online mind you and riots were breaking out.
Again, if you think that health sciences isn't at it's core an immensely corrupt system and enterprise it's only because you neither worked in it or are benefiting from it being so. On need only look at the reputations pharma has, people like the Sacklers are only exploiting a very clear flaw in the medial system and know they can ultimately get a way with it due to the well understood conflicts of interests. It's the path of least resistance, and to think that nation states aren't looking out for their own interests an will lie and manipulate the population is the height of willful ignorance, especially since it's so very clearly effective: as seen here.
> Some of them said that. Many of them explicitly told the public that masks wouldn't help. However impeccable your motives for doing so, lying to the public should destroy your credibility.
As an Anarchist, if that were true than the entire enterprise of politics should collapse over night, but it doesn't because it is perhpas the most wide and willfully held form of ignorance and denial: we are too fixated on a chieftain based social order as a Species. Until we overcome this immense defect in the Human condition, you can rest assured that the most unscrupulous amongst us will continue to benefit and profit from this flawed system.
On one hand: yes, more data will inform future technical approaches and procedures.
On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.
I don't like being lied or condescended to, just because most people can't handle the information. Also, it often backfires.
Like, in early 2020, when the CDC said masks were unnecessary, then that N95s were unnecessary, it was glaringly obvious that this was propaganda to keep the public from panic-buying PPE and causing shortages.
Some people believed them, took inadequate protections, got sick or died. It led to ineffective safety policies. It torched the CDC's credibility right out of the gate. They got called out later for flip-flopping. It led to "trust the science" being so ridiculed. Mostly, I got mad that it was such an obvious lie.
This. The many little white lies killed trust in institutions.
People knew things were not adding up. The mistrust drive them to search and search for answers, and if you search long enough on internet, something will turn up because search engine don't have discernment.
That created the breeding ground for conspiracy theorist to gain unprecedented audience.
It's ridiculed because trust was immediately violated, and trust is not what science is built on. However just being an everything skeptic without any scientific education is not good either.
The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption.
Both camps were wrong plenty of times, none would admit to it, and public discourse suffered because neither side was willing to cede ground to actual science.
> The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption.
This one part is correct. For example, when they admitted to being wrong about masks after they had better information, lunatics claimed they were lying and corrupt. And they have been spreading wild-eyed propaganda to this day.
It wasn't just about waiting for better information, though. The restaurant infection in Washington, where the spread of the virus matched convection currents from the air conditioning, along with the super spreader events from singing, etc. should have immediately made them suspect aerosol transmission. There were numerous, obvious clues about it from the beginning, but it took until late 2020 for them to acknowledge - far after independent virologists had raised alarms.
The argument, as far as I can tell, was just that the effect of different kinds of masks on covid transmission hadn't yet been studied. Which means that data was a priority, sure, but recommending masks as an initial precaution against an extremely contagious novel respiratory virus just seems sensible.
I've lived in many US states, including in the south, and I have not met very many of these ignorant, xenophopic, scapegoat-seeking people that everyone claims to be worried about. Seems like those people, if they exist in any significant numbers, are just an excuse to lie to the public "for their own good".
If you didn't meet those people, then either you're ignorant yourself -(with all due respect), or you are not looking closely.
I'm from the south. I went to high school there, I got my college degree from there. I live there from the time I was born until my mid-20s. The south is full of racist, horrible people, it was common in my youth to hear people talk badly about Jewish people, people dropped the n word. I heard people talking about non-Christians shouldn't get to vote. I heard plenty of sexist words about women for men. It just beggars belief that you would never hear this kind of speech.
I just don't commonly hear this on the west coast in the US like I did in my years in the south. And unfortunately I still hear it when I go to visit.
Not everyone is like that! But enough people are that, so that you're going to encounter it over and over again.
As someone living in the South, I would really appreciate it if you stopped tarring everyone who lives in a Southern state as a "racist horrible person". There are many millions of people who live in the South.
Some of them are racist, millions of them are not.
When I was a kid in the south my barber constantly talked about the problems of black people and that he saw crosses being burned and that he didn't want his daughter to like black boys. I'm not making this up! They literally burned crosses in the town I grew up in.
In my very first comment I said that not all people are like that. Yet sadly, to this day, I constantly do meet people making casual racist comments when I go to the south. And when I say the south, I include the state where I was born which is one of the states that fought against the US government in the civil war.
Not all people are like that but there is an issue that a lot of people are like that.
Alabama had a ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution. Struck down in the 60s by SCOTUS but still on the books after that. When they put it to a referendum to repeal it from the text of the law - the vote was surprisingly close:
> The amendment was approved with 59.5% voting yes, a 19 percentage point margin, though 25 of Alabama's 67 counties voted against it.
And Oregon didn't repeal its black exclusion laws until 2002.
And just over 20 years before that there were riots in Boston over desegregation of schools.
It's so funny, this romantic notion that many from the north have of how supposedly enlightened they are, while the south is a bunch of backwater hicks. I know, I used to have it too, as did my wife then, who was Canadian. People thought we were crazy when we moved to Texas.
I really had my eyes opened. I encountered far more tolerance in Texas than anything I'd ever experienced up north.
Try being black in some communities in Vermont. See how well you do. Compare it with New Orleans.
Of course you can find racism and racist enclaves anywhere, but this asinine idea that "the south" is some sort of backwater racist hole while the north is a pristine liberal utopia is nonsense.
Also, I hate to disabuse you further, but I should also point out that the population of the capital of Alabama, Montgomery, is 60% black and 30% white. Whites are firmly a minority in the capital.
As a Canadian I was tempted to use my own experiences of people spouting stuff that made me think I had fallen in a time warp to the 1950s. But that's subjective. And the above thread was about the southern USA.
I was not trying to pile on the south bashing so much as to simply point out that pockets most people would consider remarkably regressive persist, not specifically in the south per se, as just in North America at all. I was particularly interested in the last bit: 60% majority in favour, yet 25 counties majority against. Localized, varies by community. It's like that in Ontario too.
As someone who's lived all over, the primary difference in the south is that there are large African American populations.
Try being black in South Dakota or Maine.
Racism and othering exists everywhere, but physical proximity and interaction with the class in question moderates it heavily. It's harder to hate someone you know personally: that's why segregationists were such staunch opponents of any social integration.
> On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.
Doesn't matter. Truth should be prioritized first. There are mechanisms to deal with Xenophobia and hate and those should be strengthened.
Seems like the future would be better served by putting safeguards in whether or not China was responsible. What safeguards specifically are you proposing, and why do they demand a culprit?
For me it isn't about the effectiveness or the blame it was that we spent 2 years where many fundamental and basic rights were suspended because of fear. For me it is not about blame it is about reminding people how fragile our rights are and that there are people all to willing and eager to take them.
Combined with the massive redistribution of wealth that happened as a direct result of government action that further widened wealth inequality.
We had an emergency health situation and the government made emergency rules. Those rules were rescinded later when the emergency was reduced, partly because of widespread vaccination. This is not the first time that during a health emergency the US govt at various levels made temporary stringent rules. It turned out that our political argument against the rules is probably why the u.s had a much higher death rate from covet than other industrialized countries.
Why do you believe that? The best available evidence (e.g. the cochrane review) suggests those stringent rules were not effective. Where I live (Japan) there were very few stringent rules and despite a high population density and an elderly population the number of excess deaths in covid waves was negative. Conversely China imposed some of the strictest rules in the world and has had one of the worst affected populations.
Authoritarianism is a very natural human response to a crisis. But the biggest lesson of the Covid-19 era is that it's thoroughly counterproductive. Responding to an uncertain situation, that everyone involved should have known was uncertain, with strict rules, that naturally had to be revised back and forth, destroyed the authorities' credibility, polarized the public, and did a lot of harm. We need to make sure it doesn't happen again.
> Where I live (Japan) [...] the number of excess deaths in covid waves was negative.
Not in 2021 or 2022 according to [1]: "Japan had excess deaths of up to 113,000 in 2022, more than double the figure of up to 50,000 the year before, according to newly released health ministry statistics"
Absent a feasible zero-COVID strategy, which for most countries was never in the books due to their geographical situation, lockdowns have been found to have virtually no impact on reducing the spread of COVID.
You'd have a point if these actions saved lives, but they didn't. And it turns out in some cases, the actions probably led to more deaths, e.g. NY quarantining patients in nursing homes.
I think instead of panicking over temporarily needing to wear a mask on public transit, you would be better served directing your energy against the trillions in handouts to the already wealthy or actual incursions against our rights like the good ol' Patriot Act.
> Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible?
Well. Dr Fauci was the guy who gave the money to this institute for gain-of-function experiments which would not be tolerated in the US. (Get the dirty, dangerous work done somewhere else where people can ideally die without causing a fuss).
"Grant money for the controversial experiment came from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Anthony Fauci. The award to EcoHealth Alliance, a research organization which studies the spread of viruses from animals to humans, included subawards to Wuhan Institute of Virology and East China Normal University."
Our findings should be complemented by high-throughput sequencing to obtain additional sequence information.
I don't see this having been done (and HTS isn't exactly a heavy lift these days, even in Italy). Seems likely they did it, didn't confirm these preliminary results, and didn't publish because it's not interesting.
> Just moments ago, an NGO called U.S. Right to Know released heavily-redacted U.S. State Department cables that it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. One July 2020 cable reads, “Initial Outbreak Could Have Been Contained in China if Beijing Had Not Covered It Up.”
Or it could do the opposite. Both Taibbi and Shellenberger are independent investigative journalists with no party loyalties. Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets. They can make a few mistakes from time to time but own up to them. Their opinions are their own, but they rarely report anything not factual.
Um, among the "mistakes" Taibbi recently "owned up to" is falsifying information in his Twtter Files reporting. Among other things, he deliberately misrepresented mentions of the non-profit Center for Internet Security (CIS) as the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). It's clear that was not a mistake, but a choice he made in order to further a specific narrative - one that he only admitted when confronted about it. [1]
Two minor and inconsequential errors that he owned up to even before the segment aired.
This is a particularly stupid gotcha given that CIS was the government contractor working for CISA/DHS to help facilitate social media takedown requests — Mehdi focuses on a minor error while obscuring the big picture to defend the Department of Homeland Security’s overreach.
Per SCOTUS, working through an intermediary is not a loophole around the First Amendment. For purposes of regulating free speech, a government contractor IS the government.
So yes, in hundreds of tweets and articles reporting the Twitter Files, there were a couple errors that Taibbi instantly corrected. That's how you build trust and integrity with readers. It's what MSNBC, CNN, and FOX almost never do.
Taibbi deliberately edited the text he was quoting in a way that changed its entire meaning in order to support the claim he was making. And after having the "mistake" pointed out, it was weeks later that he "just discovered" his "mistake". The article at Techdirt I linked explains this, along with how Taibbi misrepresenting 22 million tweets one Election Integrity Partnership report tracked for their own work as being the same as the under 3000 tweets they flagged to Twitter, and how he lied about how the Biden campaign was able to report non-consensual Hunter Biden porn to Twitter during the 2020 election campaign.
If it makes you feel better, you can see it as a prominent and controversial journalist on a high-profile story making a number of elementary but significant errors that just happened to support his preferred view, instead of him deliberately misrepresenting facts to push an agenda, but neither interpretation does a anything good for his credibility as a journalist.
What is your proof that he "deliberately" edited the text to change the entire meaning rather than just misstated it? As others pointed out above, this edit/mistake doesn't seem to negate his claim given that the two agencies were working together in this regard.
Regardless of if they were mistakes or not, there is more than enough found in the Twitter Files to be concerned about. It would have been much more interesting to hear Medhi discuss the substance of Tabbi's work. Instead he tried to discredit everything by cornering him on air with small details that Taibbi clearly wasn't prepared to fact check live.
Given the timeline of events in reporting on the Twitter Files, it seems likely that Taibbi et al were working long hours, digging through thousands of emails and messages, trying to piece together what was happening at Twitter over the previous 4 years. Typing one letter wrong in an acronym, among hundreds of acronyms they had been seeing in emails, doesn't surprise me. They were essentially live tweeting their research.
Also, Taibbi and others responded to this claim that he exaggerated the 3000 tweets as 22 million tweets. https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1644111356709289993. It was not 3000 tweets but rather 3000 URLs that they targeted for removal by removing any tweets containing those URLs. Seems like many reporters are making mistakes to support their preferred claim here.
The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the investors[0] in Substack. I count at least one billionaire-run fund in that list.
There was also an incident a couple months ago where Elon Musk accused Taibbi of working for Substack, which he denied, but in leaked texts says they "originally hired" him[1], which I find confusing.
FFS this is like claiming you are funded by BoA or JPM if your salary is deposited there.
They are literally paid by their subscribers, Substack is a mere payment & publication tool. Substack do not pay them.
Moreover w.r.t. Taibbi he has picked fights with his employers and quit at the first hint of them trying to influence his work. His credibility on that front is actually excellent and better than anyone at the NYT, for example (Who may be excellent but can't point to a history like that).
"When we started Substack in mid-2017, the future for writers was frightening. [...] We started experimenting with advances, paying a small number of writers sums ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 to cover them for a few months as they got established on Substack. [...] With Substack Pro, we pay a writer an upfront sum to cover their first year on the platform. [...] In return for that financial security, a Pro writer agrees to let Substack keep 85% of the subscription revenue in that first year."
If we're discussing Freddy De Boer this is relevant. He was on that deal. Which they won't renew and can't easily withdraw fwiw. Kinda different to being fired by Rupert Murdoch. Or having your story spiked, when it was 100% true but went against "the narrative" when that narrative was also false.
Do you have evidence that Taibbi is on this deal and has lied about it? Because that's a huge claim to make.
Huh. I didn't know Taibbi made a big deal about not taking the salary up front. I misread your comment to mean "substack doesn't pay any of its writers, they all make their money off subscription" and couldn't resist the citation.
Claiming that a private company with significant investment in it has "owners" is not controversial. It's unclear to me why this bothers you so much. This isn't intended as an attack on Taibbi whatsoever, it is just plain wrong to say that a for-profit company funded by some of the largest SV funds is not an owned entity.
You can make the case that because Substack writers do not have an editorial process and fact checking that it is distinct from other news outlets and you'd be correct, but it doesn't change the fact that it is a platform that billionaire(s) have a financial interest in.
Taibbi is paid by his subscribers. The end. He's not influenced by the vendors of his pen or his pc or any of his other suppliers. Each of those supplier companies has owners and nobody need care.
If substack the company don't like his writing and try /anything/ at all, he takes _his_ business away from substack. Substack work for Taibbi. Taibbi is the customer. Substack have as much influence on the stories he reports as your bank rep does on your work. Substack's owners are wholly irrelevant.
The point is that Substack is completely, totally and utterly beside the point when it comes to journalistic influence & integrity. It's unclear to me how you are missing this point. The ownership of substack has zero relevance here. None. As opposed the ownership of the WSJ and Fox News (or msnbc, cnn, nyt, etc) which clearly and obviously is extremely relevant to the output of any journalist /employed/ by those companies.
You're making the claim that Substack is making no money on the subscriptions? And that the infrastructure they provide to process these subscriptions is completely decoupled from their company to the point that if they banned a writers account their subscribers are totally portable? This is an impressive feat, if true.
Taibbi pays bank fees. And tax. And his isp. And for stationary. And substack to provide his cms and payment gateway. He is the customer in /all/ of those transactions.
There is no credible claim of substack trying to influence writers. Unsurprisingly substack is used by wonderful journalists and idiotic charlatans alike.
Glenn Greenwald has left substack for locals for his own reasons, i don't think he has any argument with substack. Seems to have been frictionless including transfer of subscriber credit from one platform to another.
Mainstream media has "owners" who "fire" editors when they don't like the stories being written. Journalist pitch stories at those editors. See Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London, The News of the World, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. For example, note how many times Tony Blair and separately Gordon Brown sought audiences with Rupert Murdoch.
You subscribe to the NYT or WSJ you use whatever payment gateway they set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ.
You don't subscribe to substack it isn't possible.
You subscribe to say Racket (which is Taibbi) or separately Shellenberger and use whatever payment gateway they each seperatly set up and you read content using whatever CMS they employ. Substack is a service provider and one they can easily leave as Glenn Greenwald has in the shift of his news service to locals and rumble.
So with this information you can start making better arguments.
>The claim that the funding doesn't come from a "billionaire owned outlet" doesn't really track if you look at the investors[0] in Substack.
That's your claim to which I objected. It is nonsense. Your linked article above is ridiculous and has /nothing/ whatever to do with that claim. Don't admit it, just acknowledge you got it totally wrong. Easy.
Individual reporters making money with a blog (instead of employment with a news outlet) certainly have worse fact checking. The best news sources in the world have huge fact checking teams that help to verify everything. This small mistakes that Tabbi made would be much less likely to slip if he were part of a major news org.
I'm old enough to remember when any journalist who didn't check their facts wasn't worth reading for anything beyond entertainment value. P.J. O'Rouke would need someone to do the work for him. Sy Hersh, not so much.
I look at Taibbi's work and haven't found uncorrected error. NYT? WaPo? Well it's not fair, there are orders of magnitude more opportunities for them to mess it up but yep, they sure have, often, on stories Taibbi didn't.
It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves.
Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
Step one is realizing that the establishment lies to you.
Step two is recognizing that the other guys are more than happy to lie to you too, or lie to themselves, and have an even easier time of it due to lack of vetting.
The problem is that when you are leaning towards believing something anyway and find out that you were being lied to about it, you don't become more critical of all information, just information that is in conflict with what 'seems' right to you.
It is a terrible side-effect of doing things like teaching kids in the 80s and 90s that marijuana was a terrible drug because when they find out it isn't, then everything else they said is suspect and any authority that tries to say anything about drugs gets treated with suspicion.
In line with this, using fear of the worst possible outcome in order to scare people backfires heavily if it doesn't happen because then convincing them of anything related to that subject again is going to have to come from a completely different source and direction.
Often new, independent journalists will claim that the mainstream media is lying to the citizens and when I replace "mainstream media" with "my competitors" it makes a lot more sense.
"My competitors are lying to you" is a variation of the "my competitors have a bad product" claim that I imagine many small businesses make to discredit the market leader.
Does it mean that the market leaders have a better product? Not necessarily, but I don't automatically trust a business to be honest about its competitors, especially if the business is new and gets market share by directly attacking its competitors.
All levels of aptitude/intelligence are equally likely to be conned because a con works by getting your emotions to turn your intelligence to the task of tricking you.
For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
> For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
But you might be better at that the more intelligent you are. E.g. I understand there's an established result that professional ethicists and ethics researchers act less ethically than the average person on average, because they find it easier to come up with excuses for how what they wanted to do was actually ethical.
Agreed! However, you're missing that the higher your aptitude, the higher the bar for tricking yourself.
So yes, a very intelligent person can come up with a sophisticated justification to trick themselves. A less intelligent person will come up with a less sophisticated narrative. Both people work on the con till it's enough to pass their bar, which is why I say it's a factor of desire rather than reason.
A restatement might be: There is "book smart" intelligence and "street smart" intelligence. People without a lot of street smarts but a lot of book smarts are probably easier to con.
> Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever.
You should probably expand your reading to his articles in Rolling Stone, particularly those from 4-5 years ago. You would not say “ever” if you did that. But…for a writer that admittedly leans left in his politics, he is willing to call out that side when a story leads there.
He is much like Glenn Greenwald in that respect. Both he and Glenn get a lot of hate from folks on the left for daring to stray from the left messaging orthodoxy.
He falls into the class of writers who claims to lean left but in the past years has actually been a pretty obvious supporter of the right. This is a transparent yet effective schtick - for some reason people never question the framing of "even so-and-so is willing to call out their own side".
I think you might be over generalizing “the right”. He certainly aligns on specific things with the right, but not everything—only where there is common overlap to his personal politics. Same as on the left…
It’s ok to be on a “side” and still be critical of that side. No one would rightly accuse Bill Maher or Jimmy Dore of being conservatives, but they are damn sure critical of certain perspectives as of late of the American left.
It's fascinating to see what different bubbles we live in. I and most everyone I respect and run into the opinions of would consider Maher and Dore small-c conservatives.
Bizarre. Both were very vocal supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016/2020 DNC primaries and have multiple occasions pushed democratic socialism as their ideal political paths for America, but because they are also occasionally critical of leftist authoritarianism tactics or ineptitude of democratic politicians they get lumped to be conservative?
I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du jour anyone who departs from that orthodoxy would be dismissed as conservative.
Did they shift their opinions…or did the left simply shift leftward so that democratic socialism proponents now seem conservative? I’d argue that most probably did not shift their politics and opinion, but the definition of who is left and who is right changed—at least from the “orthodox” left’s perspective.
Amazing that in 2023, Bernie Sanders and his supporters are now considered conservative.
Democratic socialism is not conservative. There's this specific weird case that a number of Sanders' prominent supporters turned out to be really weird people. A number of them, including Brienna Joy Gray, are supporting RFK Jr in the upcoming election. This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line.
> This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line
That really is my point, the center political position is always arbitrary…in general and on any given single political opinion. So most normal people don’t break exactly along the dogmatic lines set by whatever is the governing authority of right and left.
My political opinion is driven above all else by pragmatism that does not break cleanly in right or left or by party. As such where i sit on the political spectrum is always relative to the person evaluating my opinion.
Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
I used to identify as left, and would still do that, except that what passed for left-leaning news during COVID became nothing more than propaganda, and left-leaning journalist put their investigative and sceptical credentials to one side.
During COVID, and still perhaps even now, it turns out you can become a member of the far right, just by staying politically still.
> Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
There really seem to be some strange shifts recently in the US where the democrats have become quite a bit more hawkish and intolerant of alternative opinions than I have ever seen before in my lifetime.
Couldn't have anything to do with the lack of action against constant mass shootings, police brutality, regressions in law's around women's bodies, the attacks on LGBTQ rights, no couldn't be.
Honestly, fuck outta here with "alternative opinions" noise.
I get the feeling they are just disappointed in where liberalism has shifted and their recent work is calling out that discomfort.
My reading of both is quite honestly the exact opposite of what you describe, they tend to call out the authoritarianism they see no matter the side. Frankly even Taibbi’s recent foray into Government and Twitter is more an indictment of a government’s overreach into controlling speech which is very authoritarian in action. That series spoke about both Trump and Biden’s administrations attempting to control public discourse. It certainly feels like it was more critical to the Biden admin, and that might help the GOP…but that might be because there was a lot more evidence of it provided to him.
I think Greenwald started his rightward journey with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", or at least, an acceptance of the fact that right-wing media were the only people willing to platform him criticizing the centrist consensus, even when he was still criticizing it from the left. But over time he's been so love-bombed by right-wing media that he's actually switched sides.
I disagree about a lot of the rest of what you say, but I think you're on point with regard to Taibbi and Greenwald.
Chomsky isn't a fascist. He's just stuck in the mid-late 20th century anti-Vietnam-era paradigm and thinks everything that happens in the world is always America's fault. He hasn't updated his view of the world since the 1980s at best.
> Their funding comes directly from readers rather than corporations or billionaire owned outlets
... is also problematic.
If I build a following of people with certain views, I'm aware that if I don't reach the conclusions they expect, they'll go away and take my funding with them.
The subsection 6 that you quoted is under the section:
3011. (a) In making a determination of the best interests of the child in a proceeding described in Section 3021, the court shall, among any other factors it finds relevant and consistent with Section 3020, consider all of the following
For example, another subsection is
(3) The nature and amount of contact with both parents, except as provided in Section 3046
This has absolutely nothing to do with falling under child abuse.
This list of articles is right out of a conspiracy theorists fever dream. Great intellectual content here HN, thanks for sharing. Now go outside and take a walk before you go off the deep end.
So this list is perfectly sane then I suppose, it’s as simple as that. I think the reason so many people like this stuff is they get to pretend they’re smarter than everyone and have the real information. You see, they did the research. They are big brained and everyone else is too stupid to understand. A convenient fit for a “smartest person in the room” fantasy. Authors like this provide fuel for that fantasy.
So what? Anything bad happens, people have many theories that go against the official narrative, from quite possible, to absolute idiocracies, from "Epstein didn't hang himself" to flat-earthers, from usa involvement in iran coup to "bush did 9/11"...
Somehow we have netflix documentaries about flat earthers (even if making fun about them), discovery channel has "documentaries" about ancient aliens, mermaids, ghosts, etc., but a "lab leak theory" has to be censored everywhere.
It's because he makes constant clearly incorrect scientific claims, says conspiratorial things about vaccines that are obviously wrong. We haven't hidden the deaths of millions of people who got the COVID vaccine. We just haven't. And for all the billions of people who got the vaccine, I'm sure there were a handful of people that had serious reactions. But contrast that with the millions of people who literally died just in the US. He is trying to reverse that equation and claiming that it's all a big secret with no evidence, that's the problem with people like him.
And he's been doing it since before Covid, and still spouts the lies about links (which don't actually exist) between vaccinations and increased rates of diagnosed autism.
Let's be fair... the vaccine conspiracies have a lot of backing by the gaslightng of our own government and media. I live in a small country of slovenia, we didn't approve any of the russian or chinese vaccines, so for normal people, there were four options - astrazeneca, J&J, moderna and pfeizer vaccines. All of them were marketed as safe, the marketing material from our government was that the 90-95% of the vaccinated won't get a symptomatic covid, and that everyone should get vaccinated "now", with any of the vaccines.
Then a few people died nearby, and astrazeneca was temporarily removed from the list of options and wasn't recommended anymore. But the other three vaccines were safe and effective.
Then a young girl died here from from a J&J vaccine (the popular choice, due to it being a single-shot one), and we stopped using that. Suddenly the "classic" vaccines were not ok anymore, and the "all four are safe and effective" became "you should get a mRNA vaccine".
Then a bunch of young men ended up with heart issues after the moderna vaccine, and suddenly only pfizer is "safe and effective".
Also the "95% chance you won't get symptomatic covid" became a slightly "lower chance of hospitalizaton or death".
All of this of course came after the "masks are ineffective and you don't need them" that almost literally overnight (it was over a weekend) changed to "masks are mandatory in xyz places".
I mean sure.... science, conspiracies... but if you want to fuel a conspiracy theory, the best way to do it is to say something, then change what you said, and ban people who continue saying what you said a few days earlier.
> It is perhaps noteworthy that this is the writing form that a lot of mainstream news articles take (advantage of?).
No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that. There's room for argument about the use of anonymous sourcing, but there's a huge difference between "someone involved in the decision process" or "with knowledge of the events" (commonly used descriptions) and what the authors did here, which amounts to "someone who works for the US government anywhere, but we won't tell you their expertise".
But yes: a lot of it is about trust. We trust editors at NYT and WaPo to make sure their journalists know who their sources are and not to lie or spin about them. And while, sure, sometimes this process breaks, on the whole it's worked very well for a very long time.
Throwing it out the window so that someone can get clicks on substack posts, or (worse) because you don't like the political implications of the trusted journalism, is a really bad idea. A world of Fox and Substack, where "sincerely held opinions" take the place of "truth", is sort of a disaster.
>No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that.
Many did it with Adrian Zenz ad nauseum and there's a few other outliers i've noticed. It's kinda silly.
People claim he's the target of a chinese disinformation campaign but he couldn't be an easier target if he tried.
From his far right political views to taking a number from a dubious source to begin with, rounding up a ton and then listing an even higher number or quoting numbers from a more reputable paper and adding some extra zeroes because what's a decimal point even? One would chalk it up to a mistake if he didn't pull constant weird mistakes in his favour.
> No, no way does a serious paper go to print with a source like that. There's room for argument about the use of anonymous sourcing, but there's a huge difference between "someone involved in the decision process" or "with knowledge of the events" (commonly used descriptions) and what the authors did here, which amounts to "someone who works for the US government anywhere, but we won't tell you their expertise".
"Anonymous sources" is a superior attack vector - it is well psychologically established as "normal/righteous", and it allows one complete free reign on weaving a believable tale for the public to update their local simulation with, no risk from your sources being exposed as bogus.
> But yes: a lot of it is about trust. We trust editors at NYT and WaPo to make sure their journalists know who their sources are and not to lie or spin about them.
Some people believe this, but I don't.
In fact, I think it is rather interesting how so many people have been trained to think this way, and no one notices how weird it is.
> And while, sure, sometimes this process breaks, on the whole it's worked very well for a very long time.
"Measured" (but not actually) on a relative scale.
> Throwing it out the window so that someone can get clicks on substack posts, or (worse) because you don't like the political implications of the trusted journalism, is a really bad idea.
You predict that it is a bad idea, you do not actually have any way to know this.
Imagine driving a car that is modified such that the front window is not a window, but rather a screen containing an extremely well known to be inaccurate simulation of the road - would this not make you nervous?
> A world of Fox and Substack, where "sincerely held opinions" take the place of "truth", is sort of a disaster.
The problem isn't just Fox and Substack, the root problem is humans/consciousness/culture.
Yep. I aw that. But then I rely on the trustworthiness of the authors, and when I know for a fact at least one of them has been caught literally making up lies that, when uncovered, literally disprove the narrative they were pushing, it really destroys all credibility.
He was not “caught literally making up lies”. There was an error in his reporting. Perhaps he lied, perhaps he made a mistake. Please don’t turn to hyperbole.
Or at least show me the evidence for his lies(not errors, which are not the same thing. Lies require an intent to misconstrue).
> The Sunday Times, one of the oldest, most reliable newspapers in the world,
(coughcough bullshit cough) The Times is not quite as bad as the Torygraph, but it is a paper that has clearly been run directly to push the political views of Rupert Murdoch for the past three or four decades.
It never ceases to amaze me how conspiricists don’t believe anything the government says, but the instant something is congruent they’ll upvote it like wildfire.
Yes. I've never seen anyone question the accuracy of the Church Committee's disclosures. People who talk about such things are normally eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted. It's just selective skepticism.
>eager to say that the US Congress and the CIA can't be trusted.
This is a truth universally accepted, no? I mean maybe not by some actual, genuine believers in totalitarianism but surely there aren't many of those? Surely?
You never trust people with power. You trust a system of checks and balances precisely because of this. You could even found a nation on that and expect continued support of it.
Sure, but the same people who frequently say this also cite the CIA's declassified MK-ULTRA documents as if they are unimpeachable fact (and not possibly falsehood or strategic disinformation). At the end of the day, the average forum skeptic trusts the CIA more than most normal people do.
I think trusting in our system of checks and balances is a reliable way to avoid the infinite regress of Pyrrhonian skepticism, but that's increasingly seen as a libcuck opinion.
>I think trusting in our system of checks and balancees
No. A thousand times no. No damn way.
Don't trust, observe, verify. That is the /whole/ point of it. Like really, all of it. Compromising that system is the first hurdle of any person or group seeking more unchecked power. Don't trust, verify.
Without commenting on mk-ultra or any other specific thing. You assess the source. In so far as possible you assess the motives. You see who gains and loses by the release of the info and so on.
CIA says russia blew up its own pipeline. Gonna have to see some pretty good evidence of that to overcome the obvious necessary scepticism. Leaked cia doc says no russia did not. Already more plausible without knowing /anything/ else about it and I am expressing no view here about that incident or the existence of otherwise of documents. Yep both could be completely false. So you move on to corroborating evidence, multiple sources etc.
Moreover citing "the same people" without sourcing is weak as water. There are as many views as there are people to hold them. Inside the cia they will not be of one mind in their thinking.
>>> You trust a system of checks and balances precisely because of this.
>> I think trusting in our system of checks and balances
> No. A thousand times no. No damn way.
Which one is it? I paraphrased you, and you contradicted your own recommendation.
You’re proposing a flawed research methodology which uses an a priori fallacy. If the CIA says A, but an internal memo says B, B is more trustworthy. It’s equally as gullible as believing A, just inverted.
This is a treacherous assumption, especially if it concerns the CIA, which has among its stated missions information and psychological warfare. Propaganda using “accidental” disclosures is normal. By all means, use additional corroboration to update your Bayesian credences, but at that point you’ve advanced beyond the lazy skeptics being discussed.
The difference is between trusting that a system of checks and balances is required and trusting some particular implementation of something calling itself a system, without verifying what is actually happening now. Close your eyes, the system is perfect, I trust the system.
I highly recommend the formal study of history and the analysis of sources in particular for all of us. There is always more to learn.
I mean, I didn't originally want to call out the insane claim that everyone should try to personally verify all truth propositions. I guess you truly are the ultimate skeptic, or you have infinite time to throw away. Fortunately, for all productive people, our institutions are reliable, more often than not!
You didn't want to because nobody made that claim perhaps?
I do it when i want to. So do Dave and Mary. Abby is a professor who takes a professional interest in it as it pertains to X. And so on. It's open, anyone can. Anytime you have a doubt there it is.
In cryptography we never trust secret algos, that's pretty normal. I haven't verified every open one I've used either.
The credibility of a disclosure is not merely a function of the disclosing entity. The average forum skeptic 'trusts' the CIA more in that they believe they have a better grasp of the CIA's situation/incentives/etc. than the average person does, and thus a better ability to judge the credibility of particular disclosures. Some may actually be a better judge, some may not. Imagine a manipulative ex telling someone they never loved them. Whether or not they believe it will depend on their mental model of that person, not on how trustworthy they are.
Pyrrhonian skepticism is generally proposed as the solution to infinite regress, why do you suppose it would it be a cause?
With respect to 'libcuck', I find myself frustrated by the existence of the term because I want submissives to be respected (out of play). I'm sad to hear that your view may have been referred to in such a tasteless way; while I disagree, I do not think your view is unreasonable.
You could have skipped reading entirely; it's conspiracy clickbait. To the puzzle-solving mind, an anomalous clue is the unicorn you spend your whole life chasing. There is a well-known conspiracy community around covid. It follows that this is trying to harvest a couple thousand in revenue by baiting people who are playing with covid conspiracies, by enticing them with the false promise of an anomalous clue.
I hope the author is reading these comments and sees me calling him a piece of shit.
Elsewhere, there are many sources, 'Nancy Messonnier was an officer of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), the CDC’s elite team of “disease detectives,” patrolling the world to prevent epidemics from arriving on American soil.
“EIS officers serve on the front lines of public health, protecting Americans and the global community,” the CDC claims. When diseases and public health threats emerge, “EIS officers investigate, identify the cause, rapidly implement control measures, and collect evidence to recommend preventive actions.” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0212-cdc-telebriefi... Transcript of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Response Telebriefing Print Press Briefing Transcript Friday, January 17, 2020 https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2020/t0117-coronavirus-sc...
Yeah, reading this to see what the evidence is, it all comes down to "anonymous State Department sources", and some informed speculation from people in the field. I don't actually think an accidental lab leak is all that unlikely, but I'm also not being presented with any evidence for it.
How would they actually know (unless there was very specific evidence of something like a lab accident associated with it) that these people were actually the first to fall ill and not just very early infections?
My sources on the planet Earth say that nowadays this is the way to write news, essays, blogs, podcast videos, and books in order to attract attentions.
Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city.
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
> Although it didn’t receive a lot of traffic, the market was one of only 4 places selling wild animals in Wuhan. It’s one of the most likely places for a wildlife spillover.
> As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Now we’re talking about odds of 1 in 100 million, that the virus made it from the lab to the market twice but showed up nowhere else in Wuhan.
Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be.
It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake.
Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing.
I just want to add to this that when I first heard about this virus I searched the WIV on Google Maps. I believe that was 14 January 2020. When I searched it again a few weeks later, the location on Google Maps had changed.
I have no screenshots of this, but I did find it quite odd at the time.
Addresses of things change on Google maps. They fix problems and find issues and it's entirely possible that an address changing means something was updated. Or there's an international address conspiracy that Google is part of, you'll have to decide for yourself!
This change of address is initated by an authority of that region or owner of that business.
What exactly is your motivation is spreading FUD on this matter?
You don't have to be a business owner to change the location of a business on Google Maps. They rely on the general public to correct inaccuracies - I've done this a few times for certain locations near me. Presumably they use some kind of scoring system to determine whether the request to make the change is valid.
I don't think it's fine. When I worked at Google, we got updated address information for businesses periodically and we had an official process that applied updates to the data we had stored. It was actually a colossal pain in the butt. I could see that still being the way that addresses can get updated?
omniglottal, I wish you'd comment further about address info changing. Like the other responder to you, third parties can ask to update address info. It's absolutely not conspiratorial. Can we agree it's not a conspiracy?
It wasn't a pre-set error, rather each satellite was originally configured to broadcast a low-precision coarse signal and a high-precision signal and the high-precision signal could only be decoded using an encryption key. They later released the encryption key when civilian applications took off.
iirc there still are several signals broadcast, a rare public high precision signal (for land surveyors), a high precision stream (military) and a high enough precision stream (public navigation)
Sort of. It uses a pre-defined transformation that doesn't interfere with street navigation. If you're on a street it will precisely reflect that value as well as any other GPS. But it makes it difficult to perform purely GPS-based instrument navigation, which in theory makes it harder to conduct eg missile strikes.
A bit different. The GPS restriction was to prevent GPS on a device moving over 400 mph (I think that's roughly the speed?), and to limit accuracy to within a few meters rather than a few centimeters. The restrictions were intended to prevent the use of civilian GPS systems in precision missiles.
Not a lot of civilian uses require anywhere near that speed or accuracy.
It's a lot harder to justify grossly inaccurate geographic data as not hurting civilian uses.
you're referring to the CoCom Limits on GPS receives, which limits functionality when the device is moving faster than 1,900 km/h aka 1,200 mph) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft), so you can't build a home made ICBM with it. Technically it's supposed to be and and not or, and high altitude amateur aerial ballonists tend to hit that flight ceiling, and so have a list of chipsets they can use in their balloons that don't stop working when they get too high.
I never understood how this works, at least effectively. Isn’t this just a device DRM? If you can build an ICBM you can probably hack a gps receiver, or build an unlocked one, no? If that encryption key is in every gps device, surely it must be available on eg darknet. And thus you could use existing gps infrastructure (ie avoid the expensive part of launching your own satellites). What am I missing?
Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.
This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.
Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.
Google is doing no business in China, so they don’t “have to.” They could easily bypass that by internally mapping the imagery to the vectors, they have thousands of developers who could do this.
Even if they had to buy it, they’re not buying it because again they don’t do business there.
>became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses
I was in Thailand in february 2019 and came down with SARS-like symptoms that were very similar to Covid-19 once that became known.
SARS-like viruses have been going around for a while, meaning they affect the respiratory system. Doesn't mean it was covid-19, what even differentiates SARS from covid-19? I have no idea, I'm just a layman who happened to get sick.
Covid-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
From [0]:
> Through DivErsity pArtitioning by hieRarchical Clustering-based analyses,5 the newly emerged coronavirus was deemed not sufficiently novel but is a sister virus to SARS-CoV, the primary viral isolate defining the species. The SARS-CoV species includes viruses such as SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV_PC4-227, and SARSr-CoV-btKY72. SARS-CoV-2 is the newest member of this viral species. The use of SARS in naming SARS-CoV-2 does not derive from the name of the SARS disease but is a natural extension of the taxonomic practice for viruses in the SARS species. The use of SARS for viruses in this species mainly refers to their taxonomic relationship to the founding virus of this species, SARS-CoV. In other words, viruses in this species can be named SARS regardless of whether or not they cause SARS-like diseases.
Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me.
During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I couldn't eat anything else and I needed energy, and I remember not tasting it.
I'm not saying it went unnoticed for a year, it's just an interesting thing that happened to me that I didn't pay attention to until after covid was detected.
I even know how I got sick, it was on the plane from Copenhagen to Doha. Two thai guys were sitting next to us and one of them was visibly sick. We felt pity on him and offered him a pillow or candy sometimes. Then 1 day after we landed in Udon Thani we both got sick.
I haven't looked at where Ben Hu's lab is, but epidemiological distance in urban areas doesn't necessarily follow map distance. In particular, proximity to a shared subway or bus line can be more important than physical proximity, since many commuters will put up with longer travel times if they can tune out, and a packed rush hour subway car is a great place for the spread of airborne infectious diseases. (In US cities one might consider two homes epidemiologically close despite a 10 mile separation if their children take the same school bus.)
Cases were roundly distributed, not along any particular artery. Note that the WIV is not even close to being in frame there- that's how much farther away it is.
>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market.
Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one" and "many" — if there were two spillovers, why not three or four? Why not a whole gaggle of infected raccoon dogs?
> Based on number of visitors, Worobey estimated the odds at only 1 in 10,000 that the market would be the first superspreading event in Wuhan.
This is based on a location analysis of early cases around Wuhan. That doesn't imply that the first event was at the market, only near the market. In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital. Huazhong University of Science and Technology is one of China's top ten universities and might have a pretty good hospital.
> In particular, the market is across the street from a railway station
Which can be trivially ruled out, because then the spread would have been all up and down the rail line. The first infection point would have been on the train, among all those people getting off at all different stops. It would not have suddenly become infectious just as that person stepped off the train.
> and one block away from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Tongji Medical College Union Hospital.
The evidence for zoonotic origin is how people regularly found or contracted SARS-like coronaviruses from animals. The evidence there was any relevant research at that university is zero. It's not a government lab, those projects would have been public.
Neat, thanks for that last link. It could use a table of contents but it did contain more information related to the DEFUSE grant proposal which is what I have thought of as being indicative of a lab leak.
Sadly that article doesn't disprove that theory, but it does detail its weaknesses which is a good enough jumping off point for further reading.
Did they "end up in the hospital" or did they go to the hospital to get a diagnosis? I live in a city, and my PCP is in the local hospital. "seasonal illness symptoms" sounds FAR more like they were just sick and went to the doctor, like anyone else would. For medicine.
And what exactly does "hospital" mean in China? I know in India a hospital can basically be a small clinic, not unlike an urgent care center in the USA.
Outbreaks can only happen in places of high density/congregation, by the nature of the required proximity. It could have been dancing around the perimeter for some time.
Maybe my perspective is incorrect, but this seems trivially possible to me. This problem with proximity is why kids didn't go to school.
"Epicenter" does not mean "origin", by any definition of the word. The epicenter is a statistical thing, in this context, not an origin thing. The epicenter of COVID in the US was New York [1]. The origin of COVID was not New York. This is no different than the epicenter being the wet market, but the origin possibly being somewhere else.
"Epicenter: the part of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake"
It's all probability of intercept. Density and frequency are important. Relative-to-a-mall probably isn't super useful, in a city with 11 million.
That's not really relevant. The cases are all still very far away from the WIV, which is itself far from anywhere the thread implicates eg residential areas.
I also suspect the thread is just flat wrong- the people most relevant to viral spread are NOT the ones who are only spending part of their day in the city. Its the people who live there and spend all their time there.
.... written by a geoscientist. There are limits on the ability to transfer knowledge between domains (although this doesn't mean the geoscientist is necessarily wrong, and often even amateurs can find big problems with papers that got through peer review).
The geoscientist in question is actually arguing that some of the flaws in the paper are due to the authors' lack of expertise in geospatial analysis.[1]
that may be- I am not qualified to say after reading the twitter thread, but my money is still on the peer reviewed paper written by the virologist, based on a large collection of priors. Note taht the "geoscientist" is really a hydrologist who works on oil and gas, so their ability to comment on the centering model is still suspect. From what I can tell, "dawalker" is just a retired hydrologist with no special skills in this sort of analysis, especially in an biological contexgt.
We are dealing with situations where smart people are using social media to promote propaganda in response to academic publications. Twitter as a medium is not really the best place to carry out these sorts of discussions- for exmaple, when I read walker's tweets, they jump all over the place and make many different arguments which are incomplete. If he really has a problem he should take his case to retraction watch and get the paper retracted if it contains invalidating errors.
The peer-reviewed literature on COVID origins has been unusually bad. I assume you don't think SARS-CoV-2 came from pangolins; but Nature published "Isolation of SARS-CoV-2-related coronavirus from Malayan pangolins", and took more than a year to correct it. (They said the virus was widespread among pangolins, based on multiple positive samples; but in fact multiple papers had been written about one batch of smuggled pangolins.)
Map-based arguments for the exact site of introduction seem generally like noise to me. Worobey has made aggressive claims in preprints and media interviews, but even his Science paper falls back to just "epicenter", a weaker term without standard epidemiological meaning. SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into the Americas at air and seaports; but even with the advance warning to public health officials, that's not where the first clusters were found.
Definitely not. But if you just want to hold up credentials, then David Baltimore seems pretty convinced that SARS-CoV-2 arose unnaturally, and I'm pretty sure a Nobel prize beats a paper in Science. So I hope you now agree credentialism is dumb?
Some areas of the origins debate require deep knowledge of the evolutionary biology of related viruses (e.g. the extent to which the coding of the FCS suggests engineering), but most of the debate is understandable with only basic molecular biology and math. From your post history, I'd guess you're better-placed to understand something like Pekar's epidemiological model than most of his reviewers were. So if you're interested enough to comment here, then I'm not sure why you wouldn't try?
I don't change my opinion of David Baltimore or of SARS-CoV-2 based on his belief (I am actually completely undecided and have been waiting for convincing evidence of any kind for some time). Baltimore is actually a bit kooky, he's not the first Nobellist to do/say dumb things: the inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, was an HIV-causes-AIDS denier https://www.ihv.org/news/2023-News/USA-Today-Fact-check-Rese... Anyway, Baltimore recanted some time ago, agreeing that he was far too strong in his claims (this is a common problem in science- people who are convinced often get really angry and insistent about their beliefs).
To be honest, I'm so unhappy with modern medical literature that even starting to try to understand a specific model would be highly unpleasant for me- generally, my experience has been that once I start pulling the threads on a paper that isn't strictly strong quantitative biophysics, the sweater comes apart. The vast majority of medical literature requires extensive analysis and a thorough understanding of all the context before you can even really start to make useful criticisms.
My general statement remains: my priors still place a higher weight on trusting papers in major journals that haven't been retracted yet, than on out-of-domain scientists on twitter. It may not even be true in this case- perhaps dawalker is actually totally right and you can't conclude much from the WOrobey paper. But more importantly: nobody yet has shown any true "smoking gun evidence" for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. I am not even going to get remotely excited about it for at least a decade, since that's about how long it takes for the community to calm down and start thinking rationally again.
I'd tend to agree that Baltimore initially overstated the significance of the FCS, though his updated position seems close to my own. I'd certainly agree that whatever Kary Mullis saw wasn't a physical glowing raccoon, that megadoses of vitamin C won't cure cancer, etc. That's basically my point, though. Prestige--personal, institutional, or otherwise--is no guarantee of quality.
It's not meaningless either, and in general I'd also place higher weight on a paper in a major journal than on a random Twitter thread. As to COVID origins in particular, I believe major journals have published unusually poor-quality work. This continues an unfortunate pattern set in past biosafety incidents (1977 flu, Sverdlovsk, etc.), of dismissing the possibility of an unnatural cause until the evidence was incontrovertible.
The math in the Worobey papers isn't really that inaccessible, and I'd consider some of it as good work if it weren't so grossly oversold. I agree there's no definite evidence for any origin of SARS-CoV-2, and I don't think the article linked here adds much. I do think revelation of the DEFUSE proposal did, and that UNC's and the EHA's prior silence on that is inexcusable.
Definite proof may never come, but for now the American government continues to fund high-risk virological research. That seems terrifying to me. Reckless agricultural practices also continue to risk novel pandemics (in the West too; our use of antibiotics on healthy animals may get remembered as a crime against humanity). The risk of reckless virological practices is additive to that though, and much more easily controlled, simply by defunding. I therefore believe it deserves attention now.
If you read the linked thread, you might actually be able to engage with the argument on its merits, without resorting to ad hominems and appeals to authority.
That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.
Unless someone has specimen samples from the sick WIV scientists, this doesn't really prove anything. Nasty respiratory viruses with Covid-like symptoms aren't actually that rare, and there's a lot of overlap between a bad respiratory infection and a mild Covid infection. I've talked to numerous people in the US who swore they had the full checklist of Covid symptoms well before the November 2019 date they're talking about in this article, but these claims are not borne out by the observed data in viral surveillance.
It's really unfortunate that there isn't some kind of rigorous global pathogen surveillance program that's regularly sampling the world's population and doing sequencing for novel pathogens. The only reason we discovered Covid in the US early on was because the Seattle Flu Study kinda broke the rules and went back through their samples to test for Covid when they weren't technically allowed to do it. Ideally we'd have global wastewater surveillance as well as individual anonymized sample gathering. It sounds expensive, which is why nobody wants to do it, but Covid really shows how badly it's needed.
Proof is not objective. There are levels of proof, different ones for civil and criminal in the US. So, maybe this doesn't prove it to you, but it will prove it to others. Argue for what level of proof you think is right here, but there is no absolute in proof for anything like this, ever.
You're not wrong. My take is this: the context of this debate is, for many, "China caused the Covid pandemic intentionally and conspired to hide their culpability." It's a big claim, literally a conspiracy theory, so I'd put it at the standards of a criminal trial. This is circumstantial evidence and, while it's certainly evidence that could be used to prosecute that claim, it isn't a case of China being caught in flagrante delicto. In particular, the screaming headline "First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV" is very weak. There are reports from someone that people at WIV were sick. Nothing firmly supporting that it was Covid, and nothing but anonymously-sourced evidence that people at WIV were even sick.
If it were a criminal case you could be right. But you cannot sue a nation state, you cannot imprison an institution and culpable people may be hard to come by.
But actually, civil liability is more relevant here, since worldwide damages were extreme and changes in how virus research is handled are obviously necessary. So if one were to sue relevant parties in a civil court for damages or to force their procedures to be changed, the standard of proof is just "more likely than the other explanations". And I think one may get there, at some point.
Also, for a civil case, intent isn't necessary, negligence would also suffice.
He said they may have done so and that there's a chance it was intentional, which is entirely true and quite a reasonable thing to say. He acknowledges that it's unlikely, and he doesn't think that they would do that or that they did. But it is absolutely possible. You'd have to be crazy to think it wasn't possible.
The same article says:
> As the pandemic began spreading in earnest in the United States, President Trump and other high-ranking officials in his administration began to circulate a controversial theory that the coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, though there is no evidence supporting this claim either.
...which is a lie. There was evidence supporting that claim even back in June 2020. The mere fact of the lab's existence in the city at the time and the subject matter that it was studying is evidence. It is not enough evidence of its own, but it is (circumstantial) evidence. People get convicted of crimes based on circumstantial evidence every day, and rightly so.
It took me five seconds of googling to find the president floating that theory. To say nobody is accusing China of using Covid as a bioweapon is a howler - we have a whole community of cranks who are saying there's a conspiracy to conceal the fact Earth is flat, of course there are legions of cranks saying Covid was spread on purpose.
It took me five more seconds of googling and I found "Nearly 30% think China likely to have spread Covid on purpose, UK poll finds."[1]
Do I think China did this on purpose? No. Was it a very effective economic weapon? Yes. Should we be on the lookout for others trying to do this on purpose? Hell yes. Just because you’re paranoid…
I'm trying to wrap my head around this statement. If Covid was a weapon, it was a breathtakingly bad one at every conceivable strategic and tactical level. It's like saying "nuking your own country in order to poison the rest of the world with the fallout is a very effective economic weapon."
you're thinking internationally, you should be thinking supra-nationally. Some elements within China and USA wanted economic warfare (sanctions, dependence-decoupling) to prove they can come out on top
Every war inflicts damage to both sides, as soon as you lob one bomb you should expect more lobbed back at you
what war really is is applying enormous economic strain (both offense and defense) until one side collapses
From that view, the decision to release a virus that plausibly emerged from a Chinese lab performing research tied with US scientists creates a solid fog of who's responsible, both sides deny an attack happened at all, and the war mongers get to have their economic game that ideally (for them) leads to such jingoism on both sides that hot war becomes a likely outcome
Yeah it seems that they could have been sick with anything. They could even have been sick because of what they were working on. There's no mention of how often people get sick in the lab. Like maybe people were sick in September and May and February with "covid like symptoms" because they do research on covid-like viruses.
It's a pretty specious line of reasoning to say that the fact some people were sick with "covid like symtpoms" (which are basically "flu like symptoms" for many) points to them being "patients zero".
Also the State Department release they link to is complaining about China's secrecy but leads by saying they don't know.
a close family member swore they got covid at CES 2020. they went to vegas and came back real sick for a couple of days.
i remember in 2020 or so they were also talking about covid being in the sewage in some european city (i think in italy? and/or spain?) but my assumption was they were detecting things that were also common in other influenza strains.
If SARS-CoV-2 was all over CES 2020 on Jan 7-10 then people would have already been unmistakably dying. Once you've infected around 1,000 people in a geographic location it has already spilled over into an elder care facility and rips through there and kills about a third of them.
The first such incident in the US wasn't until a patient got sick on Feb 19th in Kirkland, WA.
The fact that the virus doubled every 3 days and slaughtered people in elder care facilities means that it isn't credible to think that it was floating around CES 2020.
The doubling rate of 3 days and the high level of mortality means that the virus doesn't really hide for that long, although due to exponential spread it is first very slow and then it quickly becomes very, very fast.
It is good at cryptic spread for 1-2 months, where it is very difficult to detect and the first several hundred people mostly just get colds and nobody notices and it actually spreads fairly poorly and cryptically, but then it reaches a critical mass and the superspreading events start popping off and someone gives to one of those elder care facilities and then it can't be ignored.
If it was all over CES or any other tight cluster in early Jan (the usual "everyone at work was sick in Jan I bet it was COVID" idea) then that would have marked a point where the virus was changing from cryptic spread to announcing itself. You once that happens, you can't avoid the virus slaughtering a care facility before the month is out. Since that didn't happen, then the infections at CES didn't happen.
> then people would have already been unmistakably dying.
Yeah, but the actual number of COVID dead has been a widely disputed topic and it's well established that excess deaths significantly increased during the pandemic, which indicates that a lot more people died overall that didn't go down as formal COVID cases[0]. It's very likely that early COVID deaths were not properly counted because we weren't in formal pandemic protocols yet.
Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available. I don't think it's a stretch at all to think that it had widespread reach early in 2020 when the research indicates that the actual number of COVID dead in 2020 is more than double what was officially reported.
From the piece I've linked below:
> On 30 January 2020 COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) with an official death toll of 171. By 31 December 2020, this figure stood at 1 813 188. Yet preliminary estimates suggest the total number of global deaths attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 is at least 3 million, representing 1.2 million more deaths than officially reported.
When it hits an elder care facility (particularly pre-pandemic where they're not taking any precautions) something like 1/3 of the residents die. They are more or less the canary in the coal mine. And it is not typical to have a respiratory virus rip through one of those facilities and kill so many people.
And doctors were on the alert in Jan and would have noticed a cluster of cases.
(And the lack of pandemic protocols means that the death toll would have been high -- and just like what actually happened with the Kirkland facility they would have been able to get tests -- and with a sudden high mortality outbreak like that they would have gotten the CDCs attention)
> Also anecdotally, I knew people in the Midwest that contracted severe flu in December 2019 and January 2020 who later tested positive once the ability to test became available.
They probably caught asymptomatic or lightly symptomatic COVID.
And/or if you're talking antibody tests, the early ones had poor specificity and would give false positives.
Anecdotally there was the bodybuilder who thought he caught COVID early, tested positive on an early antibody test and later got decimated by the real virus. Decent chance he had a false positive.
I know a bunch of NYCers that swore they got covid in Jan 2020, but it's both mathematically impossible for all of them to have had it based on the circulating numbers at the time, and then when they actually got Covid in the coming months/years they changed their tune.
Oddly, I assumed I had it early in the waves. Never got a positive test, as folks weren't testing back then. Finally had our first positive test this year. And whatever I had at the start was way way worse than when I had covid. Such that I can understand a lot of folks being very confused on all of this.
Honestly, odds are high I did have an early covid case. Was like an asthma attack with a few nights of fever. And I had every symptom. (Though, my understanding is loss of smell came and went as symptoms? I can't remember what the final call on that was.) I never got a confirmed test, as they weren't testing then.
Mostly irrelevant, as I don't think it would change anything else. Keep your distance and try not to get people sick is still good advice. I just offer it as understanding that there is a lot to be confused about on this. Kind of like early claims that kids couldn't get it. Which is asinine on evidence of everything kids spread through the family.
My understanding is that the loss of smell from early COVID tends to be fairly profound. It makes food disgusting. You can burn food on the stove and not smell it even after the fire alarm goes off. And it recovers slowly. It isn't like the usual changes in taste/smell during an infection which are mostly due to the symptoms of rhinitis and clear up when they clear up.
An article from the journal Lung[1] points out that Post-Viral Anosmia isn't exclusive to Covid[1]. It occurred with other viral infections, which is why you can have someone with a bunch of seemingly Covid-like symptoms but not have Covid. There's also this lit review[2] showing that destruction of the olfactory epithelium can occur in Parainfluenza virus, Human Coronavirus, and Rhinovirus.
Yeah, that was my understanding, and is what I had. Was odd to find I could breath just fine, but couldn't smell coffee.
Had a similar thing happen a year ago, where I couldn't even smell menthol rub. Could breath, just couldn't smell. That time, though, I was testing and never got a positive test. I thought, at the time, the general idea was that loss of smell wasn't a thing, anymore. Maybe not?
I didn’t have anything early (I’ve never caught it despite multiple direct exposures, but I rarely get sick from anything anyway), but both my wife and son-in-law came back from separate business trips in late January/early Feb 2020 with all the classic symptoms. Both subsequently caught Covid in 2022 and both described the experience as very similar to their 2020 experiences.
No way to know for sure if it was Covid in 2020 since no testing at the time of their illness, but I would not be willing to bet against the possibility despite all the “it would have been impossible due to…” theorizing some folks have said on this thread.
late Jan / early Feb becomes more possible. there was certainly cryptic spread by then that was happening over airplane travel. both of them getting it would be unlikely though unless both of them were in china or italy or had contact with people from there.
but you simply cannot diagnose covid just via symptoms. every symptom that covid causes can be caused by other respiratory viruses, covid just makes it more likely that you'll get more severe symptoms.
2019/2020 cold and flu season, before covid showed up, was also a particularly bad year, with H1N1 back and influenza B spreading at the same time (plus RSV, common cold coronaviruses, human metapneumovirus and everything else).
Oh certainly could have been another respiratory ailment, but the abundance of coincidence to timing, symptoms (which were quite severe), and a general assumption that it’s not over here just make me skeptical of claims that “it couldn’t be covid because…”
You can't diagnose COVID on the basis of severity though.
I caught absolutely the worst flu of my adult life (in fact might have been the only case of flu I've caught in my adult life), but it was 12 months earlier in Jan 2019 so I'm positive it wasn't COVID. Ran a 103F fever for 72 hours straight, probably should have gone to the ER, was wiped out for about a month afterwards with post-viral fatigue. Had it happened 12 months later it would have looked a lot like COVID. I suspect it was just H1N1 which was ripping around the globe again after having gone fairly quiet a few years after the 2009 pandemic (and I never caught it back in 2009). Basically the same H1N1 strain was still going around in the 19/20 season.
This does make me wonder if having covid and h1n1 circulating at the same time wasn't much more of the problem than either one in isolation.
Specifically, something was different about that first wave of covid. Yes, it stayed deadly. Early waves that were overwhelming hospitals, though, were tiny compared to what came later.
I also still can't but think covid was far more widespread than we understand, even today. By the time that folks acknowledged that schools could be spreading it, it is hard not to think basically every kid hadn't been exposed.
There was a really bad flu that went around just before Covid. It was a bad enough flu for me that I actually had to take a Ventolin inhaler. When I finally got covid in late 2022, I would say the flu I picked up in 2020 was worse.
We can only guess, RSV also seems to have worse effect on people than covid and flu and it is not uncommon to encounter this monster. Unless we have the sample of the pathogen to analyse, it is all hearsay.
‘Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”’
Seems doubtful that Daszak (and possibly Fauci) had little idea what was going on in that lab..
Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.
I've always had a completely open mind about it, even if experts have repeatedly suggested that it's plausible, but unlikely.
Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020, and also seem to be trying to score political points in American politics, when it seems very obvious that the CCP should take the lion's share of any blame regarding any lack of transparency.
I knew this would happen, so much so I'm pretty sure I even called it ahead of time. This happens so frequently that there ought to be a word for it.
Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Now I personally was never very attached to the theory, but I absolutely believed that we should have researched whether or not COVID-19 was indeed leaked from a lab. An actual argument against my position was that we shouldn't as it would only further fuel racism, xenophobia and geopolitical tensions even if it were true. There was also a lot of backlash against researchers who wanted investigation into the lab leak theory, probably for similar reasons.
There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
Again, I do agree that it was annoying seeing it become a political culture war issue about a conspiracy vs "trusting the science", but that is certainly not what I believe the majority of the lab leak hypothesis was angling for.
Wikipedia even helpfully separates the two ideas into separate articles.
> Yes, some conservative personalities early on had pushed some dumb conspiracies about COVID-19 being a bioweapon. No, that was not the crux of the argument that the many scientists, journalists and internet commenters had when they argued in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
It's totally insane. GP is literally rewriting history and getting upvoted for it. I post a link to a Congress bill (linked from TFA), from 2023 under the Biden administration (so not Trump), saying "there's reason to believe COVID may have originated at the Wuhan lab" and I immediately get two downvotes.
It's as if the shills who tried to bury the lab leak posts back then (not the bioweapon ones, just the lab leak ones) were still actively trying to control the narrative. This time by explaining why it was normal to label everyone who talked about lab leak a "conspiracy theory cracknut" because they'd supposedly all be talking about bio-weapon (which they weren't).
> There's always amnesia about things like this, but I'm pretty sure COVID-19 has become a case study on how not to handle a pandemic. A lot of what happened gave people a legitimate reason to distrust authority, and if we pretend that never happened things will simply continue to get worse as it repeats indefinitely.
The bill called for the declassification of any information related to the theory. Not a bill affirming where it came from. If there is no classified information confirming the theory, there is no reason for Biden not to sign it.
It's not 'some conservative personalities' and it's amazing to see people here so blatantly try to gaslight others. It was the president of the United States pushing the lab leak hard before any evidence fell down and then republican officials following up with the argument that it was a bioweapon. The reason why they did it was because they wanted to give people a reason to distrust authority. That was part of the M.O even though the person pushing this stuff held the highest authority office in the land!
I'm skeptical of the lab leak theory regardless if it's Trump or Biden pushing it because ultimately the US government is going to use whatever it can as a political weapon against other countries. This doesn't mean it's not potentially true, nor does it make China right, but it means people should be inherently skeptical of any positions the US takes on stuff like this.
I'm pretty sure your memory is very faulty. Of all those saying it could be a lab leak, very few were talking it being a bio-weapon.
> Those prattling on about how "people called us crazy" that it was a WIV lab leak seem to completely misremember what was actually being discussed in April-May of 2020
It is the sense of Congress that--
(2) there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may
have originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology;
People saying "people called us crazy" do deserve apologies, not downvotes.
EDIT: just to be clear... I'm not saying it was or it wasn't a lab leak. I'm saying that there's a Congress bill from march 2023 saying there's reason to believe it was a lab-leak. And hence all those who said it was a lab-leak and who were called "conspiracy theorists" do deserve apologies.
Until a cause is completely identified, there will always be "reason to believe". That doesn't mean that it's the most likely source or the most reasonable hypothesis.
The President was also claiming the virus came from WIV back in May 2020. It was a common theory in some media circles
That same president also claimed it would be gone by the summer of 2020. The same president even claimed it would never make it to the USA! Maybe this will be a case of a broken clock being correct twice a day but it was certainly thrown in with quite a bit of incorrect information that was being spewed at those daily briefings. I don’t blame anyone for being skeptical of the information coming out of the Trump administration during that time.
Isn’t it equally truthful to say there is reason to believe the COVID-19 pandemic may have originated elsewhere? Josh Hawley writing this into the bill does not make it anymore valid than the counter point to that statement.
I have a few family members very deep in the weeds (QAnon, Cabal, One World Order type of crap) and they love to play this narrative. In reality it seemed like it was rather obvious to anybody who looked at the facts that this pandemic had dubious origins. Just a few of these were the close proximity, same family of viruses being researched, mysterious personnel changes around the time of the initial spread, etc., yet those same family members have turned any reluctance on my part to flat out declare this pandemic as a manufactured Chinese bioweapon into flat out denial of any chance of it being anything more than a big coincidence.
I guess it boils down to conspiracy theorists believing that you're either all in, or not in at all, and there exists no middle ground to wait for more facts before coming to a conclusion one way or the other.
I also feel like noting that I didn't engage in discussion on the topic with many other people outside of aforementioned family members on the topic, so who knows, maybe I would've been ridiculed for sitting on the fence, but anecdotally I definitely remember people seeing either source as a possibility (minus the Cabal manufactured pandemic to sterilize the human race one, of course).
By "the “conspiracy theorists” keep turning out to be right" do you mean like how Trump won the election in 2020, Biden is an actor, Obama has been hung for treason, people around the globe are dropping dead from the vaccine, etc.? These are the people I'm talking about when I speak about conspiracy theorists, people reasonably sitting on the fence when there is conflicting information are not. You speak in absolutes about how _everybody_ who presented the possibility of a lab leak was banned and labeled a xenophobe, and while I cannot speak onto your anecdotal experiences, I never saw this in any platform I participated on at the time, in fact (as I shared in another comment on this thread), I leaned towards the likelihood of a lab leak after getting recommended a very popular youtube video on the topic from a very popular channel. As far as I know, that video is still available, although it has obviously been a long time since I last watched it.
Part of how cults are started is creation of a us versus them mentality, often where it doesn't exist. I believe this is why so many conspiracy theorists with more extreme beliefs might misconstrue their experiences in discussion around the topic, when in reality those discussing the very legitimate possibility of a lab leak never got much flak (anecdotally, as I said).
Precisely this. I don't care to speculate, read, or give a single care in the world about this. I think the hope for stopping GoF research is about as high a chance as the world "putting a pause" on AI. And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
And I'm not making excuses for anyone or saying the CDC/Trump/Biden are blameless and innocent, but I kinda don't know what the point of these conversations are at this point.
No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies.
I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implied in your comment. But comments? Public discussion? It's the same thing every time.
Skepticism is this cool thing where instead of assuming an unclear premise and then immediately linking it to bigger, even less substantiated conspiracies theories that thereby reinforce how "true" my assumptions must be!!... I accept that I don't have the full picture.
> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
> None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles.
It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspiracies or whistles. It's circular reasoning and you're making it impossible to express nuance.
Well now you're definitely making up stuff I didn't say and don't think. Thanks but no thanks. Like, I'm pretty annoyed that what I did say managed to get that twisted in your head, especially when I took multiple attempts at indicating that I am doing my own research and keeping an open mind, but thanks for kinda just demonstrating my point. Waste of time. Speculative nonsense and infighting so someone gets to be right. It's just silly.
So we're very clearly, I absolutely 0% think that talking about a lab leak means the speaker thinks that it was an intentional bioweapon leak or something. At all. Like, that's just straight up strawmanning in my head, but you kinda just projected that on me...
> And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.
> I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.
You literally said "I haven't seen a single discussion of this [the lab leak theory] that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles"
So where are the head nods and dogwhistles in this thread? At what point did this discussion, just like every single lab leak discussion you've seen, dove-tail into conspiracies and whistles? Because I don't see the whistles and head nods in the current thread about this (this being the lab leak theory). They're all either deleted or flagged at this point for me.
And Twitter's files showed that the government (through multiple departments), members of Congress, and private companies were directly sending lists of hundreds of names of people to ban or deemphasize for talking about it.
From your own article, we learn that your claim is wrong:
> we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps
This illustrates the problem nicely: because there was so much blatant lying about the virus being a bio weapon, people forget that there was all along more sober discussion about it being a possible leak of a natural virus and that those discussions were never banned.
You’re similarly misrepresenting what little was in the “Twitter files”, no doubt because terms of service violations are a lot less exciting.
Even back then, there weren't any good counter-arguments against the "lab leak" theory (except "it's racist" because somehow "the Chinese are so filthy their food markets cause pandemics" isn't racist?!), so to censor it, the powers that be (Big Tech, Mainstream Media) instead attacked the adjacent, but very different "bioweapon" theory.
The most popular human origin theory was a lab leak. It was easier to argue against the crazies claiming a bioweapon so that's what most did and that's what got the most press. But the primary human origin story was an accidental release.
Bioweapons research and got infected in a lab that was at BSL 2 ARE incompatible. If you expect it to be able to infect humans, you are going to take more precautions.
The theory here is that they were doing research on animal models and didn't think that humans could catch it from mice. Therefore they took too few precautions, and it escaped through them.
People were being banned from twitter, youtube, facebook ext for mentioning lab leak... Now you want to gas light everyone saying "it was perfectly ok to talk about in 2020
> Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.
> "In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps," the social media platform declared in a statement.
> [...]
> Consider that Facebook's new declaration sits atop its About page, just above the site's previous policy on coronavirus-related misinformation—dated February 8, 2021—which was to vigorously purge so-called "false claims," including the notion that the disease "is man-made or manufactured." The mainstream media had deemed this notion not merely wrong but dangerously absurd, and tech companies followed suit, suppressing it to the best of their abilities.
I remember learning a lot of the reasoning behind why I thought it was most likely a lab leak from a video I got as a top recommendation on youtube from a rather large channel that had near or over a million views at the time, so anecdotally I think perhaps a lot of the people who got banned for their discussion on the topic were either grouped up with people positing more extreme possibilities, or just an example of over reach. Either way, I personally don't remember people presenting the possibility of a lab leak being shredded (at least on youtube, I can't speak for the other platforms as I use them very infrequently).
Do you have any examples of someone who was banned simply for saying it could have leaked, as opposed to lying about it being a man-made bio weapon? The latter was common in right-wing circles because it excused their leaders’ incompetent handling of the pandemic and scientists pretty quickly established there weren’t signs of genetic modification, but throughout the process there were people discussing the possibility of a sample leaking through a lab safety failure.
It was facebook[1] stated policy to prevent all discussion, so even if there was not a user level bann they were removing all posts and discussions about it
Twitter banned lots people for it (and other COVID "misinformation") it would be hard to point to a perfect example as often people that wanted to discuss lab leak also talked about masking, masking policy, vaccine efficacy, and Vaccine mandate policies. All of which were also forbidden topics. If you dared to speak out against "The Experts" at the cdc or WHO then you were either shadow-banned (i.e posts hidden, de-ranked, etc) or outright banned
Not everyone is terminally online mate. My experience mirrors theirs, lots of speculation and jokingly considering the various conspiracies at the time.
Bioweapon was definitely one of the options that was boosted by china's outlandishly overreacting at the start, welding people into their home etc
Specifically remember a columnist at Parool, a Dutch local newspaper, talking about it how he was pressured by colleagues days after just mentioning a column it might be from the Lab.
There was a consensus in the West it didn't came from the Lab, and those who suggested otherwise were non-scientific lunatics.
Shit, I remember arguing with people like him back when the whole pandemic started that it was a distinct possibility, one of several, that should be fairly evaluated like every other. And people like him just waved it off as conspiracy theory garbage like we're seeing here. Same shit, different day, except now with the flavour of gaslighting along with it.
The media argued against the most outrageous and conspiratorial version of the lab leak theory to discredit it. They successfully made you associate lab leak with racist conspiracy
> the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon,
This was the part that media outlets and government seized upon to call any discussion of the lab leak theory racist. There was no "discussion" about covid being a "bio-weapon," it was a bunch of anti-China hawks repeating it over and over again based on absolutely nothing. They were so obviously nationalist anti-Chinese that the theory that covid happened because Chinese people are dirty and eat weird diseased things was able to be sold as the not-racist theory.
> Also... I mean, unless I've created a false memory, I specifically remember that the discussion at the time was about a the virus literally being a bio-weapon, and not actually the entirely plausible, accidental escape of a virus.
If you've created a false memory, then I've created a similar one.
I remember very early some member of Congress saying it was a Chinese engineered bio-weapon deliberately released to cripple the US economy.
There were lots of narratives. The main one that was coming out was that it did NOT come from the WIV. That gain of function was NOT happening at the WIV. That it likely came from people outside Wuhan who brought it to Wuhan and that the the Wet market was not the source either (though the CCP was pushing that narrative, others were making it more vague saying it came from the hinterlands). A second narrative by skeptics/conspiracists was that it had escape the WIV and that the WIV was conducting gain of function research. A third fringe theory was that it was a bio-weapon (this idea is idiotic given the guaranteed blowback/footgun you would get)
Also people were being banned, shadowbanned, demonetized, etc. for proposing a lab-leak theory. But, I guess that's par for the course. Remember when politicians (I mean Nancy) said, unmasked, don't worry, go back to Chinatown and do business (slightly before they then imposed restrictions)
Also, don't forget, people who saw strange unexpected repetitions (filler) in the sequencing were scoffed at.
In Daszak own words https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y. At around 1h15m he answers a question about how they were doing gain of function research on SARS and SARS related virus with his colleagues in China (WIV).
This guy then lead the sham "WHO" inspection of WIV. And Fauci funded him to work around the Obama prohibition on gain of function research.
Trump was trying to play that “blame China” card. And was disclosing classified reports left and right. Fauci was not exactly on Trump’s side. And not playing the blame game was a good option back then.
But, it’s not a good idea to reward Wuhan’s Institute type of research. And there should be some accountability in the end.
It would take a long-form article to clearly enumerate all of the reasons with citations, but long story short, the pair of them were caught lying over and over again the past few years.
For example, Daszak's paper in the Lancet claiming the virus was almost certainly of natural origin was used as the basis for justifying the censorship of tens or hundreds of millions of posts. He failed to declare his conflict of interest, as did something like 25 out of the 26 other authors. This was a broad failure among academia and news, as his reasoning in the paper was specious.
Fauci was caught telling fibs about his beliefs on natural origin as well, with a private position that it was quite likely. He also lied about funds sent to Wuhan, and the type of research they were doing.
Re Daszak knowing what was going on, he was a main funder of the lab and a drinking buddy with Shi the head researcher there. He also wrote a proposal on inserting a cleavage site into a coronavirus in pretty much the way you would have to to make covid (defuse grant proposal which was leaked, not revealed voluntarily). Asked what was going on at WIV he's said stuff more like sorry I can't say as we have a confidentiality agreement rather than no idea.
I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right next to the wet market which an authoritarian regime claims was the source), and an unbiased reading of history (like looking at 2001 articles on CNN about the last time SARS leaked from a lab).
For better or worse, I'm not a policymaker, so my opinion is meaningless and would have had no outcome on what "we" could have done differently (aside: I dislike this kind of rhetoric that shifts the blame to the amorphous "we" rather than the specific policymakers with names and titles who "we" should be blaming and holding responsible for their failures). But I've at least saved some sanity by listening to my gut instincts instead of subjecting myself to the whiplash that would have come with a world view determined by appeals to authority.
It seems this is more and more necessary these days - if you rely on authority as a heuristic for truth, your reality can shift under you at the whims of politicians who manipulate it for their own selfish reasons. It's best to stay above the fray. Sure, gut instinct can be wrong, but when I'm not a policymaker and only need to be concerned with my own health and well-being, the consequences of incorrect critical thinking are usually less bad than the consequences of trusting the wrong authority. I will continue to prioritize my "gut feeling" - informed by critical reading of publicly available data, and careful triangulation of the motives and biases of stakeholders in the current political reality - over any blessed truth that "we" have anointed as "consensus."
75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals? Just because it was a bad one doesn't make it less likely. Where did smallpox come from? Polio? Spanish flu?
Is it strange that the lab was near the wet market where it supposedly started? There are about 40,000 wet markets in China as of 2019. It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market. It's a little bit like a psychic helping the police saying "the body will be found near water." Fantastic, most humans live near water.
>Isn't the simplest solution that COVID also came from animals?
No, you don't get to leave information out of consideration and call your conclusions the simplest theory. Most viruses are from animal spillovers. Also SARS has been leaked from labs on more than one occasion.
>It might be more strange if it was nowhere near a wet market.
It's not strange that it was near a wet market. It is strange that it was near a lab studying coronaviruses that was at least thinking of doing GoF research of the kind needed to create COVID-19 if indeed it was created.
The spillover theory leaves too many unexplained coincidences for it to be the simplest theory.
And yet it happened to spillover in a wet market in a city with the premier coronavirus research labs in the country. It also happened to happen far away from where these types of viruses originate. There are only a handful of labs in the county that do this type of research and WIV is the top one.
So why did not not appear in a wet market in Yunnan or Guangdong?
We've had two spillovers now of sarbecoviruses and the first one hit a completely unrelated city. The other one happened in Wuhan, which is the biggest city in central China and its "catchement area" is probably fairly wide around it.
It does appear that they spillover in wet markets in big cities.
The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
> The level of coincidence here may look like rolling a 1d20 two times and the second time getting a natural 1.
Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents. Which is a similar distance between the Wuhan lab and wet market, though the UK version is a rural backwater rather than a major regional capital. Sometimes relative geographical proximity coincidences are just that. (if you think there's something to the geographic proximity of Porton Down to the Salisbury poisonings, you have to try to explain away an even more remarkable coincidence that two Russians protected by the Russian government took a very short holiday to 'see the cathedral' and somehow stumbled into the same boring suburb the nerve agent was left in on the same day. And the decision of presumed target Sergei Skripal to live there... )
Wuhan would look like less of a coincidence if it had been accompanied by a characteristic Chinese coverup "the researchers have retired and wish to spend their time not talking to the media" rather than something very uncharacteristic of a Chinese government coverup (scientific papers releasing data on origins which unconnected non-Chinese virologists and epidemiologists generally find credible) or if China had been way out ahead rather than miles behind in their vaccine efforts.
Lab leaks are enough of a known phenomenon not to be ruled out as wildly improbable, but the coincidence of the virus that leaks out of the Wuhan lab happening to be one they hadn't documented and happening to plausibly spread from an epicentre which contained the other most likely vector for the transmission of zoonotic viruses in Wuhan sounds... pretty much as big as the coincidence of a zoonotic virus being in the same major city as a lab for studying zoonotic transmissions of similar viruses prevalent in that large region.
> Or a more related and much bigger coincidence: a man was killed by a nerve agent in what appeared to be a targeted attack on the home of a Russian defector approximately 10 miles from the UK's main lab studying nerve agents.
That's a good one, I'm going to have to try to remember that.
But it's not, the head of the WIV even stated how unexpected it was for a SARS outbreak to happen in Wuhan and area not endemic to SARS like coronaviruses. If they wanted to be near the source they should have built it in Yunnan or even Guangdong where the last one broke out.
The lab is there for the same reason there are labs in Boston or NYC. Proximity to major research institutions
I mean the original appearance, thousands of years ago, when it definitely was not a lab leak. The point is that our worst viruses have come from nature, likely zoonotic sources.
Simplest given the known facts I think. I mean all viral pandemics in the past have come from nature. However in this case where everyone agrees it came from a bat coronavirus, the nearest similar viruses were in nature 600km+ away or at the WIV 10km away. If natural you'd have to explain how it covered that distance without infecting people en route. Also why no infected animals were found. Also the WIV lab was advertising for coronavirus researcher on its job page at the time of breakout so obviously that stuff was going on.
I'm "agnostic" whether it's lab leak or natural/from the market, but I'd like to ask how you can be certain that your gut feeling is right? I think to be certain is to be ignorant/dismiss other possibilites, and confirmation bias doesn't help in that regard, you start dismissing evidence that don't conform to your "gut feeling". I also shook my head at all the scientists that loudly proclaimed that "I'm certain it can't be from a lab, it's natural!" (A scientist should be aware, that like in a math exam, if they can be certain of something, they need to show proof/show the work!), but I'm not going to prescribe motives like a Bill Gates + Rotschild + pharma industry conspiracies behind these scientists proclaiming this. Although I am curious what did motivate them to make these very non-scientific proclamations.
If you ask me why the Chinese authorities were secretive, I can come up with many theories, it could've been a lab leak, yes, but it could also be them wanting to save face rather than face the embarassment of admitting the virus started there (is there anything to be embarassed about, or is the CCP, like many political bodies, full of men with grade-school level emotions?), heck their internal propaganda blames the US, saying they brought in the virus through the Wuhan 2019 Military World Games. Or the Chinese refusals could be them not wanting foreign organizations looking around their labs. Heck, if a virus started in Atlanta and the WHO said some their investigators from many countries, including China and Russia, would like to inspect the CDC lab there, Americans would probably scream the same amount...
Well, I suppose I'm "agnostic," too. That's my point. I have no need to be certain one way or the other, so it's better to have "good enough" confidence, which I prefer to get from a (well-informed!) "gut feeling," rather than delegating my confidence metrics to some authority who can deliver me the latest proclamations of truth from on high.
Did it actually impact me in any way to decide whether I thought a natural or lab origin was more likely? No, probably not. But I'm an avid internet commenter and so naturally I spent time reading and posting about this stuff.
But there is one tangible benefit to the time I invest in researching controversies like this when the news story first breaks: I can save time in the future when the narrative changes, by skimming stories to see if they contain new information or merely reframe existing data. At least, that's how I justify the amount of time I spent reading about this stuff in 2020...
Fun fact, I created this pseudononymous HN account to post wrongthink about Covid origins - one of my first posts [0] about it was flagged (and unflagged about a year later when I complained about it in a similar comment to this one).
I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)
I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.
As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.
Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally (seemed reasonable since viruses have risen naturally for give or take a billion years). I practiced the extreme social distancing for about a year since the vaccines were not available and wore KN95 masks the rare and brief times I was indoors with anyone else. I did start getting the vaccines at some point in 2021 though I was hardly in a rush and then pretty much dropped most precautions in March 2022 figuring that 2 years was about as much as I wanted to do. And then I finally got a confirmed covid case in April of this year which left me pretty weak but functional for about 36 hours and then it passed. I do think that getting a vaccine now and again probably kept the illness mild, but I suppose who can say - I certainly recommend them to people based on my experience. While I have a friend who was practically laid out by the innoculation, all I got was a little soreness.
> Interestingly, you did much the same thing I did despite my belief that the virus arose naturally
Except they decided not to get the injection (so called 'vaccination'), while you did. That's a crucial difference in the eyes of most (on both sides) so I wouldn't agree that they did 'much the same thing' as you.
I don't either and this is coming from a 4x vaxxed who (I'll shamefully admit) was part of the crowd who shamed everyone who didn't get the vaccine.
I still think if you live in a big city or any dense living arrangements, medical field, interacting with the immunocompromised, etc. you 100% should be getting it. But I now recognize if you wanted to roleplay lumberjack living alone in the woods or had a rural lifestyle it really isn't as important.
In 2020 Luc Montagnier identified Covid-19 as a lab creation and predicted that, because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature. In contrast, the public health conversation was about a permanent threat and how much worse can it get and generally government running around hair-on-fire.
Maybe the initial quarantine recommendation would have been the same--or even stronger-- but the pandemic impacted all aspects of life everywhere, and elements of that would have been different. EcoHealth would be a bad dream, no one would be running interference for Fauci. Vaccinations would have been a different conversation, because this would have been recognized as a temporary threat.
How does the virus have a "true nature", and why would it revert to it?
My understanding is that that viruses are well known to become more infectious and less symptomatic as they mutate over time. The reason for this is that causing the host to quickly hole up reduces the chance of replication.
Unfortunately Luc's hypothesis was not explored because, as you will see from googling his name, he became the topic of debunking and adhomenim. And maybe some of his views on other topics were wrong, but his comments on this subject have aged well.
After an hour of googling I finally found a reference to his original hypothesis.
"According to him, the altered elements of this virus are eliminated as it spreads: “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering, it will eliminate these unnatural changes and even if nothing is done, things will get better, but unfortunately after many deaths.”"
But this is just magical thinking, some variation of the naturalistic fallacy. Nature absolutely will accept molecular tinkering if it provides an evolutionary advantage.
Another commenter pointed out that, for a while, the virus became more dangerous over time, not less. And the extent to which COVID has become less dangerous over time (which probably has as much to do with widespread immunity either via vaccination or prior infection, along with the fact that most people particularly vulnerable to COVID have already died), there's no indication that it had anything to do with undo'ing any kind of "unnatural change" - in particular, the furin cleavage site that's one of the more likely candidates for being "unnatural" is still there.
So no, I wouldn't say his comments on the subject have aged particularly well.
Everything is relative, and Luc's view has aged better than authoritative admonitions that the virus might never moderate in severity.[1] I mean, Luc was a Nobel prize winner in this field. His ideas were creative, sure, but magical? It's not hard to see the logic-- these kinds of molecules subside in evolution because they didn't arise from evolution in the first place. I mean, his opinion was a first take when the world was Cloroxing bananas, There's more info now, but this still is an example of how the conversation may have gone differently had governments taken the view that lab-origin was viable.
If the virus was reverting to its "true nature" or "undoing" molecular tinkering, then I would expect to see a clear pattern of progress/equilibration towards a specific strain. That doesn't appear to be the case; the virus is continually branching out into a host of sub lineages, some of which are more transmissible, some more virulent, some less affected by vaccines.
It's a rule of thumb that variants which are more transmissible and less virulent are more likely to succeed over time, and I remember discussing this with people early in the pandemic. By no means does this provide credence for a lab leak hypothesis.
I think "magical" is quite an accurate description of the idea that even viruses have a "true nature" that they will revert to. That's some Plato-level adherence to the rigidity of nature.
> because the original strain was unnatural, later strains would be less problematic as the virus reverted to its true (less problematic) nature
Is it possible for someone to speed up this process in a lab somewhere, like South Africa, and release the less problematic version to the public to achieve the herd immunity quicker?
I doubt it. However, luckily for us someone has already invented called a vaccine that is far safer and plays a similar role in achieving herd immunity ; )
There are curious aspects of Omicron's emergence – more closely related to older less-circulating strains, many adaptations bursting onto scene all at once – that make people think that even if the original Wuhan strains weren't lab-creations, Omicron was – as a natural & contagious 'vaccine' against worse variants.
If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild.
We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.
How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been accelerated even if the lab theory were true and if they had any data on the details of the virus.
This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
> How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data.
I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Even in the unlikely scenario where they made it, stuck it on a shelf, and did nothing: they could share information about how it was created, which would give insight into it's potential current and future behavior.
> The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order.
This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created, any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it, and any other data they had accumulated on it.
> This whole discussion is ultimately useless, and the people pushing for it were never interested in finding solution, but only in finding someone to blame, which has no impact on the outcome.
It's not useless at all. If it turns out to be true, there are plenty of meaningful ramifications:
1. In the pursuit of stopping fake news and propaganda, real information from whistleblowers and researchers was suppressed and careers were ended. It would be a useful lesson in free speech and the open exchange of ideas.
2. It shows there are clearly deficiencies in these labs. Inspections could be more frequent, standards could be raised, all sorts of changes could be made to prevent it from happening again.
3. And, yes, if there is someone or some entity worthy of blame, they should be blamed. Why should their fault be hand-waved?
>I'm not a virologist, but this doesn't make sense to me. If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I am a virologist. It also doesn't make sense to me.
There's so much data that would have been helpful. If only the DNA sequence mattered, we wouldn't have the field of virology.
Data such as rate of evolution would have been hugely important in stategizing the vaccine and could have saved thousands of lives. Data on transmission, even in animal models could also have saved lives. Structural information may have been available. Antibodies and antibody binding information may have already been available which would help in identifying conserved structural motifs for vaccine development.
We don't know how long they had it, what data they had available (if it's a chimera, data from multiple viruses might have been relevant), but saying nothing would have changed is insane. That's like saying there was no point to the SARS research over the last 3 years, because we already had the sequence after a couple days.
They worked with it because they had a question they were trying to answer. That question probably had relevance to human health, and they probably had data from trying to answer that question.
> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.
> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,
The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.
> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it
> Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped.
I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.
> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?
What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.
> What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?
I think you're conflating the data existing vs the data being public. My wife has a PhD in psychology. She did research at a state school using US gov't grants. The only "data" available is the papers they wrote and presented. I don't expect a virology lab to be any less protective - in fact I expect them to be more.
Closing the borders wouldn't have been seen as racist, it would have identified as a valid tool to stop the spread, and we would have had an extra 2 months early on in the pandemic preventing the spread in a major way.
The first thing we would have done would have been to put an immediate halt to all "gain of function" research - including all of the "gain of function" research that is currently ongoing (that Fauci and his ilk insist isn't really "gain of function" research). This would include severe penalties for those who funneled money to third party researchers. Instead, the global health authorities peddled the absurd "wet market" hypothesis and continue(d) to pour money into "gain of function" research that makes another lab leak inevitable (at some point).
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Being unwilling to enforce something is not the same as being incapable of enforcing something, and stopping complex state-level research(especially nuclear) is something the US has been doing in many countries for decades. It's why so few countries have advanced bio/nuclear weapons. Your comparison makes no sense.
This comment is laden with rhetoric, but, to address your point regardless: 'military arms' are widely available. The equipment and knowledge to perform advanced virology work is not. It's much simpler to restrict.
I'm referring to the gain of function research currently being funded by the US government. We funded the gain of function research in Wuhan through the Eco Health Alliance. I don't mean to suggest we have any power to stop other countries from engaging in this dangerous research, but certainly we can stop being a party to it (and likely would have stopped if people knew there was a strong possibility that Covid resulted from a lab leak instead of a "wet market").
We could stop this research in it's tracks if the US government forced journals to not only refuse to publish dangerous research but also report the researchers to the authorities. Once you remove this incentive the whole demand and motivation for such reckless research collapses.
The article claims multiple researchers got sick. I mean, we can posit that this wouldn't ring any alarm bells... but if they have any competence at all, it should've rung some alarm bells and resulted in more testing. And if we'd developed tests for this in November, it wouldn't have been spreading undetected for months.
Yep, can confirm this took me by surprise when working with chinese colleagues in our company. Eg. I would read someone's out-of-message saying "OoO, going to hospital today" and be freaking out. But then they would be just out for couple days sick leave for fever or something. Only after like 3rd time that happening it clicked to me that 'hospital' for them means something completely different than I would have thought.
Whether that is just a misunderstanding of language or actual difference in healthcare system I never thought about.
So typically they have a "fever ward" and you will go there and receive an IV of Tylenol or something similar. I would be surprised if they didn't call that "hospitalisation". You are admitted, given a bed, a chart... not sure what else you'd call it.
Not censored millions upon millions of posts discussing the idea, for one thing. The conversation and narrative was warped, and a lot of people are now rather extremely divorced from the reality around this issue.
Gain of function research would have been examined much more closely, and with the origins known we may have had much less fumbling around protocols for containment, such as knowing much sooner that it was airborne.
I believe many people likely died as a consequence of this mass deception, and its ripple effects. And many more might die yet, if we don't reign in irresponsible bio research.
Please explain the connection you see to extra deaths. Because as I see it, nothing about how governments responded to this was conditional on COVID having occurred naturally; social distancing and mask use would still have been the correct response even if we knew with certainty that it leaked from a lab, and I see no reason why the early blunders like recommending against masking or over-emphasizing hand sanitizer would've been any different.
Why, for example, would we have known much sooner that it was airborne?
You are correct. I guess people can't handle that. This is from the article, it tracks with your sentiment:
Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”
Are we actually claiming that "Virus leak from scary china" would've gotten people to wear masks more or isolate more, versus "Virus killing people keeps spreading?" Or am I missing the point?
I think it would have. A huge portion of early deniers (generally people of a conservative disposition) were in the "it's just a flu" camp. I think "scary virus from China" would have made those people stop and think "there's no telling WHAT this thing could do!"
I think you're understanding the point. Consider what you would call an average Trump supporter. Consider what they would think if Trump declared "This China flu isn't a normal flu. The Chinese designed it in a lab and now it's out in the world. I urge every American to wear masks and get vaccinated to stop this Chinese flu."
How do you think the average Trump supporter would respond to that? Now consider what would have happened if he went all out and said the Chinese released it on purpose? It's scary to think that if he pushed the bioweapon angle it's likely that Republicans would have been lining up for vaccines and the other side taking the advice of Jenny McCarthy and refusing it.
There is so much wrong with how the pandemic was handled and the #1 things were making it a political issue, using xenophobia as a reason to not implement effective policies, and not treating it like the medical emergency that it was.
That doesn't track with their sentiment at all? "Our national and global conversation would have been dramatically different" is not the same as "many fewer people would have died".
Any response to your question is hypothetical at this point (disclaimer) so here's my hypothetical explanation of how conversation would have led to less deaths:
A lot of people believed the lab leak "consipracy theory", but Fauci and company were so adamant to contradict the "conspiracy theorists" that it practically destroyed those people's willingness to heed any of the CDC directives.
Of course I can only say anecdotally violating CDC guidelines results in more deaths, but that's the gist of my hypothetical.
Certainly, a weird coincidence that many of the people worried about it being a lab leak early on, also had downplayed it and practice little caution to avoid getting it.
If we knew it was from a lab much of the confusion over H2H transmission, Airborne transmission, asymptomatic infections would have been known much earlier. We would have take the correct measure earlier and saved lives.
Almost certainty, the population already had a sense about the spread of natural viruses and their dangers—whether valid or not. Launched from a lab is a different ballgame altogether and not having experienced the problem before people would have been much more wary.
It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the head of the government... millions of people were directly effected by this. I think we're owed the truth. This method, where there are leaks or unsourced articles, but the 3 letter agencies disagree with the probable origin, it's impossible for a regular person to decipher. Maybe that is the point, but it's a really shit situation.
> considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein
It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by a hollow suit blowhard, the only way to get back to rationality is to soundly reject the broken clock, disregarding that it might coincidentally be correct.
Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind to my team, I’m not. Don’t support him, and when listening to him yell about China virus and then listening to people calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose.
But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away.
There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that.
If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.
If there was reliable evidence that China had created a coronavirus, it would have been widely disseminated because it's the fantasy of the Republicans in the US to put it on China, and if not China then put it on Dr. Fauci. But it doesn't seem like it would have changed anything about treatment of the horrible coronavirus.
I don't really understand why people are so hot to talk about gain of function research, that just seems like a distracting point from the fact that we don't have very good public health and now politically, the US has been convinced to be against public health officials, so when the next terrible virus or disease sweeps the world, again, the US will have a failure to deal with it because of all the paranoids.
WIV collected dangerous coronavirus, mixed those virus's genetic material to make more infectious strains. They wrote scientific papers about this themselves, you can read them yourself. They tested these mixed viruses (called chimeric virus) on mice with human-like lungs to find the most dangerous and infectious ones. You can read about this in the grant funding for WIV.
Then proposed splicing in the furin cleavage site into these dangerous chimeric viruses. The US funders balked at this last step, splicing the furin cleavage site in, and didn't give a grant grant money for this proposed step. It's not proven, but it sure seems like they actually did the research, because the furin cleavage site seems to be main thing that makes COVID-19 so infectious. They proposed testing these viruses on mice with human lungs and circulatory systems.
so... do you now understand why people are talking about gain of function? Viruses like this don't exist in nature, and scientists are making them and then testing them on animals that have been genetically engineered to have human-like organs, so they can figure out how to make the most dangerous ones.
This isn't new, there is a mission impossible movie where a chimeric virus is the boogie man.
Making mice with human lungs and CRISPER is new, and then doing this level of research in place with the same level of biosafety as a dental office is a new wrinkle.
The way humans convince each other of the merits of our ideas is by describing our thought processes. The problem isn't actually something being said by someone who "is" a blowhard, but rather that the thing is being said in a blowhard manner - aggressively asserted, with poor supporting reasoning. If there were concrete supporting evidence for the assertion of "China Virus", it would have been mentioned. There wasn't.
When the blowharding is done by the usual talking heads who have a following but lack actual power, it can generally be ignored - the partisans are already crazy. The problem is when it's done from a position of governmental leadership, it requires continual active refutation lest an unquestioned drumbeat turn into action real quick. The fish rots from the head.
Most certainly the reaction to this can be (could've been) used as a cover to deflect from the truth. But blame for that doesn't lay at the feet of the anti-anti-intellectuals working to counter the anti-intellectualism, but rather the initial anti-intellectuals for creating the memetic fog that prevented rational analysis to begin with.
I have to say, this reliance on the government telling the populace the truth if it has it just doesn’t ring true to me.
In recent memory, I’ll point to going to war with Afghanistan, telling the Taliban to pack sand when they offered up Bin Laden, while ignoring Saudi Arabia. Going to war with Iraq over “wmds” and lying to the world about it.
Would the govt tell us that China, a country that owns most of our debt, and is probably the most important trade environment, started this thing and covered it up? They might not.
I understand your instinct to push back against blowhards that confidently proclaim some bullshit, which they only do when it’s expedient and helpful to them. I’m just saying that instinct that I also had might not be good. To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
I'm not arguing that "government" will tell population the truth. Rather that if a President is making an extraordinary claim that is actually based on some concrete details in a classified briefing, then we would expect that President to reference those details - especially a President who readily publicized classified information. That he did not points to the claim as being from the same vein of political misinformation as non-existent "wmds".
> To discount a whole tree of idea ideas because some jackass is shaking it, maybe just ignore the jackass and still evaluate the ideas.
Sure, this is valid if one is taking the time to sit down and examine the topic themselves from first principles and thoroughly verified facts. But, at least to me, the aspect of where Covid came from didn't deserve that effort of investigation, especially compared to analyzing things like how to protect myself.
Without analyzing everything from scratch, one is left to examine other people's arguments. And the problem created by someone in a strong leadership position spewing bullshit is that it creates a strong attractor for many other people to choose the same conclusion, and then work backwards fleshing out the details to support it. So it's not that the whole tree of ideas should be ruled out, but rather that legitimate arguments supporting that tree of ideas become practically indistinguishable from bad faith ones. This isn't a desirable state of affairs, but rather the pragmatic reaction to strong distortion of the information landscape - especially when the distortion is pushing towards a destructive course of action.
I understand your reasoning here, I agree without spending an inordinate amount of time doing first person research on every topic we all basically have to fall back to listening to other people's reasoning on a subject and then decide, but I'm curious, has discussing this and reading the article (and probably some of the other information around) caused you to rethink COVID origin possibilities or at least do some more reading about it?
You're asking in the context of me personally, rather than in the context of the topic.
That answer is "no". The importance I give to a topic is mostly based on what is actionable, which for this topic would seem to be limited to posting my resulting opinion on social media.
Just like I never bought into the "China virus" narrative, I also never bought into the "no, it's definitely not from a lab" narrative. I am comfortable with leaving a topic undecided in my mind.
Contrast with say masking, where I looked at the details and decided to start wearing a P100 respirator in public in February. That was something I could do, where the downside was really small (oh weird looks in a store, boo hoo), and the possible upside was much larger.
In the context of the topic, I didn't find my skim of this article particularly compelling. No smoking guns stuck out at me, and it would seem that other ways of the main claim happening aren't as uncorrelated as one would think at first brush (eg virus circulating publicly in Wuhan, these researchers get it, which is then noticed and recorded because they care about such things for lab workers). But in line with what I said above, that isn't a rejection of the article and "no that definitely didn't happen!", rather it just didn't move my needle much, and I am comfortable with it remaining ambiguously unknown.
The main claim of the article is the bat coronavirus researchers at WIV were hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November. The wet market outbreak was in December into January.
I don't understand how long it got for humanity as a whole to see the elephant. New virus, research center close by, Chinese denying but not letting investigation. It's like seeing your your husband exiting a brothel but still need proof he cheated.
There were stranger coincidences in the past, and China always denies an investigation, so it's nothing special in this case.
Especially with Trump as president and we all remember the proofs of the WMDs in Iraq.
BTW there are multiple reasons to enter a brothel without cheating, they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters.
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
>When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”
That isn't the same as saying one of the three was Patient Zero.
"they need electricians and plumbers too. According to you they all are proven cheaters"
Humanity acted like its stupid and a conspiracy to ask if this man is anything else than a plumber. I mean if you see someone exiting a brothel and the first thing you think is that he is an electrician, there is some problem with logical thinking there. It's not that there is 0% chance. It's not not the default. Our default was that he is a plumber which should have been immensely less probable.
I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.
What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime - if it were true, the magnitude of the disaster would be 100x what Chernobyl was for the Soviet Union, it wouldn't just be an accident at that point.
Would it totally legitimize the Chinese state in the eyes of its people and the world? And for that reason, could we ever expect a honest accounting? Too much blood (literal and metaphorical) has been spilled and with the lockdowns, vaccine mandates, passports, school closures, etc and everything else that has happened, most elite institutions, state actors, businesses, media, corporations have become complicit in some way in abuses, lies, deliberate obfuscation of one type or another.
> I am really interested in the social-political dimension of this. Was the initial hypothesis of a lab leak suppressed during the initial part of the pandemic primarily due to Western government's fear of a diplomatic breakdown (like Russia) with China? The economies are far more interdependent than compared to Russia and there is a far more economically important Chinese diaspora in the West.
I wonder to what extent the hypothesis has been shutdown because the people who were considered to be qualified to make that assessment are interested in the continuation of gain-of-function research.
> What would it take to get a honest investigation within China? Presumably not under the current regime
You answered it yourself, impossible under the CCP. It seems that they convinced their population that the virus has actually emerged somewhere in the west, and that was the end of it for them.
What would it take to get a honest investgation within US? The fundemental issue is why would PRC entertain US lab leak propaganda narrative? Let alone submit to basically weapons inspection tier scrutiny that no sane sovereign would permit. Keep in mind "lab leak" hypothesis was conjectured by PRC netizens along with US Fort Detrick lab influenza and Wuhan military games conspiracy theories. Obviously US politicians and "intelligence" would conveniently converge on the theory that looks bad for PRC. Is US going to cooperate to address the other PRC conspiracy theories and let WHO investigate USAMRIID? The realistic answer is covid will become distant memory and origin will be relegated to conjecture based on domestic politics.
The symptoms reportedly included loss of smell and "ground glass opacities" in the lungs.[1] That's not necessarily COVID, either, but a few too many coincidences for me.
> ..."developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019".
My partner and her siblings developed a COVID-19-like illness in November 2019. It was far worse than any flu they'd ever had and even put one of them, an otherwise healthy 30 year old, in the hospital for several weeks.
I wouldn't be surprised if COVID-19 was spreading as early as October.
I have a friend that has had COVID-19 at least one, and he swears he also got it in 2019 along with the friends he was hanging out with that weekend. There are probably lots of instances like this and we may never know for sure.
From the top comment of the article: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today.” Apoorva Mandavilli, "science" reporter for the New York Times.
Instead of replying in spirit the same message to various comments here, I generalized the skepticism in one. To people commenting that "experts had repeatedly suggested that it is unlikely to be a leak."
Experts, that is people studying in biochemistry/biology/virology labs were and will always be saying that it is likely. Working in such a lab without accidents would be a historical miracle.
That is one of the reasons working actively with
and producing bioweapons was "ditched" effectively by a lot of countries including the U.S. (Or at least I hope.)
It is hard to tell from the writing - are the sources claiming that they know the researchers were sick with Covid-19 specifically, or are they saying they know the researchers with sick with something, and that they had symptoms consistent with covid-19?
We go from:
>Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
To:
>not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019,
I can't make sense of this article. It is a bit rambling and seems to mix quotes from different times.
"Politicians, scientists, journalists, and amateur researchers for years now have zeroed in on the possibility that Covid-19 may have resulted from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research conducted in China."
And the authors leave it at that. Maybe some references to articles would be nice? Or should I just trust their meta-analysis or what.
At that point there were not good diagnostics for covid as it was probably brand new. The supposition that it was covid is based on other evidence like them doing research on coronaviruses.
There seems to have been covid cases in Europe in last-quarter 2019, which suggests it was there or brought there before the outbreak that made the news in 2020. Doesn’t rule out leaks and crossovers, just moves them elsewhere or else when. Viral pneumonia was occurring, symptoms turned out to match covid and nobody was saving or testing blood samples. Outside of a few places in Dec. But people had aggressive, surprising lung problems that didn’t present flu symptoms. Maybe that was a pre-covid leak or they’re incorrect when the leak occurred.
It also hit the initial sites very quickly, which suggests very contagious or already present in some form. To put my tin foil hat on, was omicron the “antidote” virus that was deliberately released to put the fire out? It was very different genetically and even more contagious.
I heard from a friend from Taiwan that there were rumors of some kinda of virus spreading around by mid 2019 in China. The thing is if there were blood samples showing a much earlier date of covid spreading in China there is zero chance we would ever hear about it. It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on just so happens to be a huge textile manufacturing center with a huge Chinese population.
If you're talking about Prato, your information is completely wrong.
> It is also worth noting that the region hit hardest in Italy early on
There was a paper released early/mid 2020 that was attempting to group the virus into various strains (this was before the "variant" terminology emerged), that attempted to identify changes in the virus's behavior and classified different mutations with things like L, LL, and M. For the most part it was either ignored or ridiculed as being too early, that there hasn't been enough time for mutations that change its behavior to have accumulated.
Thing is, I distinctly remember it identified one mutation that seemed to originate in Italy, was trackable as it reached the US East coast, and every place it spread to had a spike in deaths that coincided with when it overtook the previous variants in prevalence for that location.
The Wuhan Games, at which 10,000 athletes from the worlds' armies participated, wrapped October 27, 2019, after which people left Wuhan to return to their homes all over the world, including to Italy where many of the first cases outside of Wuhan occured
> Event 201 wargame about just such a disease was held in October 2019 — where people “role played” many of the policies we saw enacted.
On that one, remember how monkeypox seemed to come out of nowhere in early 2022? In early 2021 there was a similar pandemic scenario for monkeypox, and the scenario's in-game start date was only about a week off of when it started in the real world.
I got ill in a way I'd never really gotten ill before, in November/December 2019 -- after having travelled from Mexico to Norway. I was barely out of bed for the month I was in the country. I thought it might be dengue, but one of the first days there I got checked out in the hospital -- and they said I had an unidentified viral infection, but not dengue. After being released I got incredibly ill, but not much you can do with viral infections anyways so I just rode it out.
Having had Covid 3 times since it was named, I've got a pretty good grip on what it feels like -- and I've many times wondered if I didn't have it back then in 2019 as well, as the symptoms lined up too well.
I got a worse-than-ever-experienced respiratory infection after a trip to Europe arounds Thanksgiving 2019 as well: I wasn't well enough to ski even a month later and had mysterious lung-scarring on my X-rays which in retrospect looks very much like an early Covid infection too.
I had a really bad cold-like illness in late November 2019, which left behind a severe sore throat which lasted about three weeks. It was notable because it wouldn't go away, to the point where I went to both urgent care and my primary doctor on separate occasions (I'm not one to go to the doctor unless I really need to.) Both times they took a look at my throat, proclaimed it to be a viral infection, and sent me on my way.
I too have wondered if I actually had Covid, but nobody knew how to diagnose it at that time.
That theory is total nonsense. Covid was extremely infectious, and had severe symptoms. It could not have stayed under the radar for that long. It was also unlikely to fizzle out: once a country had one case, it would turn into thousands of cases within a month.
If Covid had been circulating that widely that early, the trajectory of the disase in December 2019-March 2020 would have been totally different. There would not have been an initial outbreak in Wuhan followed by individual cases popping up in various other countries, followed by a gradual buildup of cases in those countries. By the time we got a test, there would have been hundreds of thousands ill all over the world, all being detected as cases simultaneously. It would have been impossible to e.g. trace cases to specific super spreader events, because there would have been so many sources of infections. Basically none of what happened would have been the expected outcome if Covid actually was spreading in the wild that early.
All the reports of early Covid cases outside of China are just the expected false positives from tests that don't have 100% specificity (which is pretty much anything other than full sequencing).
There were no tests except for blood samples preserved by hospitals. People are referring to symptoms that were different than flu, viral pneumonia and (looking back) showed similarity to covid. Might have been a different viral pneumonia as it didn’t respond to antibiotics.
Recall exponential growth starts slowly and it was flu season.
I am not talking of tests in 2019. I'm talking of the tests done in 2020 after, well, tests became available. If Covid had been growing exponentially in Europe for the latter part of 2019, the tests would have found massive amounts of infections. They didn't.
Likewise the after the fact findings of antibodies in blood samples would show an exponential growth. Neither of the studies you linked to shows that. The
Just look at the numbers from that Italy study. They're claiming that 10% of their sample had already had Covid on September 2019. "Exponential growth starts slowly" doesn't explain that. But somehow that went unnoticed and caused no detectable blip in the mortality rate, while a few months later an outbreak that could be tracked to a single event decimated the elderly in Lombardy.
It's noteworthy that neither of these studies tried analyzing blood samples from say the winter of 2018 to establish a definite baseline. But if they'd done that, they probably wouldn't have much of an article to write. "We found the expected level of false positives from this test" isn't exactly newsworthy.
I remember the sudden freak out in the media about vaping in late 2019 because young people were being hospitalized with lung damage. Have to wonder if that was actually covid and the vapes were just coincidence, they'd been around for years at that point so them all of the sudden having media hysteria around them was weird to me at the time
Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.
Because that's really all the information the article has.
You boil it all down and the article is just rehashing everything for the hundredth time, along with claiming "US government sources say" and dropping the three names to make it appear to be credible.
There's no details about how these government sources know this.
It also seems to be a rehashing of a New York Times story from a year or so ago which also claimed that there were three workers that were sick (without having any details) and was written by the same journalist that wrote the Iraq/Niger Yellow cake Uranium story back around 2002 that led us into the War in Iraq (and the same plot line that led to the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson/Dick Cheney affair).
These articles go on a bit. There is a good summary of the science evidence for a lab leak from on twitter from Richard H. Ebright (Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers):
>They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.
> Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.
Why publish speculation now, instead of publishing when there is actually something to report?
Can someone please explain to me what difference it makes. AFAIK, no one is claiming this was a bioweapon or intentional assault. So what difference could it possibly make where COVID originated from.
I think the lab leak theory is wrong, but even if it was true I no idea how that should change anything.
Well, there's the reinforcement of the decreasing trust in media for framing anyone talking about the lab leak as an anti-science bigot.
Then, more practically, if it was an accidental leak, it would mean that a much more detailed assessment needs to be performed of if what they were doing should be allowed elsewhere, if handling and disinfection methods need updating etc.
Might also lead to legislation regarding the responsibilities of people hiring these sorts of labs (eg even if China refuses to take responsibility and update its own laws on the matter, other countries could ban their own researchers from contracting work out to labs which don't meet certain standards).
The President of the United States was claiming that COVID was engineered in China as early as May 2020. I don't know how someone can claim they weren't allowed to talk about it.
Possibly because over a hundred million links were repressed by Twitter and Facebook for this.
Or because people who spoke up about received every kind of pushback - firing, demotion, smears, even death threats.
That Trump posed it as a likelihood means nothing in comparison to millions of posts getting flagged, shadowbanned, repressed and completely wiped. You get that, right?
The theory (and even wilder ones, like COVID being a bioweapon) were reported all through 2020 on Fox News and other media sources. It wasn't a silent theory. There were a lot of crazier theories about China manufacturing COVID as a bioweapon, which got lumped into the "Lab Leak" bucket.
No, people called him a racist for things like calling it the Kung Flu, and some of his positions with regard to Chinese (and Asian in general) people and other racist things he did. No one cared about the lab leak theory, or associated it with being racist, until Trump decided to morph it into a dog whistle for racists.
Obviously, we should try to figure it out and learn from our mistakes, increase security, etc., but what accountability can we really expect from knowing that the pandemic started due to a lab leak? Accountability is almost meaningless compared to the scale of the total global loss.
I'm reminded of a line from an episode of Star Trek TNG where a very powerful alien destroys an entire race by thinking them out of existence in a momentary lapse of judgement, and Picard simply says "We're not qualified to be your judges -- we have no law to fit your crime."
In an interview with biologist Richard Lenski (of the famous experiment), the latter discusses controversial research on selecting H5N1 viruses for greater transmissibility and their potential to be airborne viruses that are of public health concern [1]. That was in 2017...
I have no definitive opinion on the origin of Sars-Cov-2 (will we know the truth one day?), but I don't think the lab leak theory is crazy.
I admit when stuff like this comes up I think of the world analogically, the analogy being a big company with lots of divisions (countries, international orgs) working on a big important project "keeping the world on track"
Sometimes people make mistakes in the company and you realize this big mistake these people made make our "keeping the world on track" project go over budget this year etc. but hey, mistakes happen (sure we've made mistakes too, but really those idiots over on the AI department really screwed up though, huh right guys hah hah) so we're just going to keep going through it, try to iron over the mistakes, write some documents that hide the mistakes from shareholders etc. and keep working on the project "keeping the world on track" because we've got metrics to hit!
In short I think probably people realized early on in various other divisions of the big world organization that this was probably the China divisions fault - that is to say an actual 'fuck-up' and not just an accident of nature - and it was just useful to pretend it wasn't their fault until at such a point that things were reasonably back on track and then some reports can be filed indicating which divisions in the company suck and which are super cool divisions to be working at.
10 million people are dead. I find it hard to believe how anyone could not be at least mildly interested in obtaining more details about the origin of Covid-19, whether it's from the market or the lab or somewhere else.
What are the odds that exactly three years ago, your response to the same question was "The experts told us that this was definitely, positively not a lab leak, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist"?
So… finally what lots of people were claiming but got censored on social media as well as mainstream media during the pandemic is being acknowledged and verified by the government.
Follow up. Given statements to congress by government officials to Congress, under oath, that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?
PS: It was never a credible bio-weapon attack (people are now trying to conflate this to instill FUD in people's memories --go do a google search with date ranges). Bio-weapons are terrible weapons of war. They are likely to affect the target as well as the deployer.
The fact that a broken clock is right once a day doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a broken clock, and after being identified as such doesn’t get to claim oppression after rightfully being relegated to the garbage bin.
The same people who asserted things about the origins of covid were the same as those peddling quack “cures” to church groups and reposting Q anon memes.
With respect to your follow up, as much as I would like to see the former president punished for his lies, misleading statements, and general scientific incompetence, I don’t think that’s in the spirit of the First Amendment.
If that terminally online person was vaccinated against covid, they were far less likely to die than the terminally online conspiracy of the week anti vax crowd.
Your comment just shows that you are still deeply caught in the propaganda. I wonder how you and people like you will psychologically cope when you'll inevitably learn the truth over the next decades.
It's one thing to be wrong, it happens to all of us, but quite an other to literally believe the opposite of the truth and be so smug, superior and self-righteous about it.
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
I recall reading credible scientists talking about a lab leak from day one, and I always considered it a possibility. Yet many of the people pushing it on social media were pushing it as a 100% certainty and even that it was some kind of intentional bio-weapon attack. The people getting banned for this were conspiritainment grifters and people pushing fascist politics.
The most effective way to cover something up is to have Alex Jones and Steve Bannon talk about it. If Fauci really is running some horrible conspiracy maybe he's paying these people to talk about it to make sure nobody takes the idea seriously.
Then there were the people pushing the Ukraine bioweapons nonsense, which is a transparent Russian attempt to copy Bush II's "WMDs in Iraq" bullshit.
>Given statements to congress by government officials that would contradict this conclusion, will there be repercussions for misleading the public, lawmakers and the scientific community?
Huh? What got censored on social media was the idea that this was an engineered bioweapon. This isn't even the same lab people were pointing fingers at.
This information slipped over 2 years ago (probably right at the beginning). Wiesendanger did a study and referenced that a lab worker was suspected as patient zero¹ as a hint.
> “Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” said Chan. “If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”
That was so bizarre and strange. Both the shadiness of Chinese government and the complete confidence of many US scientists that the origin was definitely not related to the lab.
Anyone who suspected anything was just a conspiracy theorist. I can understand skepticism one way or another, and a desire to learn. I thought, well these scientists who spend years researching and conducting lengthy studies, somehow immediately new with 100% confidence it definitely had nothing to do with the bio-lab. It's like someone waving their hands in front of a building with smoke coming out and saying "nothing to see here, look the other way, please".
No one was hand waving anything. There were studies looking at several attributes of the virus’s genome that concluded (not definitively, nothing ever is) that the virus was probably naturally occurring.
Some looked at base pair distributions (some GC to AT ratios are required for stability), others looked for sites where enzymes could splice and whether they were commonly found in this species while others looked for any obviously transplanted.
Of all the studies I’m aware of, which isn’t all of them, there is no smoking gun. This isn’t a burning building and that analogy is incorrect. No weird GFP producing genes or any common genetic markers commonly found in lab made species were found anywhere. This isn’t to say it wasn’t a lab leak or that there aren’t opposing theories as to whether such and such base pair distribution is considered normal…but the evidence just isn’t there.
So here's the thing, whether covid came from an accident in gain of function research in Wuhan, or whether it's just totally plausible that it did, the correct response is basically the same:
Banning gain of function research everywhere. Yeah, including here. It's too dangerous, whatever scientific benefits to any positive thing that improves lives is not worth it, just stop doing it and demand that everyone else stop doing it.
So we pretty much already know enough to know that's what we should do, I wish more people could get interested in demanding it instead of talking about whether or not there's what kind of proof that it did come from that, and trying to sift through the multi-source competing disinformation. Plausible is enough, let's try to keep it from happening in the future whether it's for the first or second time who cares?
There's a problem, covid was in Italy as early as September 2019. (see Dr John Campbell's video on this)
Cases in November 2019 aren't early, it started probably six months earlier.
"John Lorimer Campbell is an English YouTuber and retired nurse educator known for his videos about the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, the videos received praise, but they later veered into misinformation. He has been criticised for suggesting COVID-19 deaths have been over-counted, repeating false claims about the use of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, and providing misleading commentary about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines.
...
He holds a diploma in nursing from the University of London, a BSc in biology from the Open University, an MSc in health science from the University of Lancaster, and a Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton. He received the Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
Sounds like a guy with some pretty relevant credentials. Accusations of misinformation are a dime a dozen, and probably made oddly enough by people with fewer relevant credentials.
I was at Madrid airport in June 2019 and waiting in the long line for border control to leave there was a man who was displaying extreme flu-like symptoms. Coughing, sweating, pale as a ghost. Mind you, this is the height of summer. Even back then, prior to the pandemic, I actively avoided him because he looked really unwell.
I know there is no way of knowing and at best it is a fanciful mental exercise, but I think to myself 'what if'?
It has always seemed to me far too coincidental that a lab studying coronaviruses was located at the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak. Sometimes there are coincidences, but if you are looking for the most obvious answer it has always been right there and I never understood why it was dismissed so easily.
With that being said, I don’t buy into any conspiracy theories about this being intentional or anything else. There were poor controls and a virus mutated.
I'm still a little baffled at what people believe will change if anything is proven about the origin of covid-19.
It's indisputable that many governments went well beyond their legal remit in response to the virus, and yet many have silently or openly accepted it.
Powerful people will do horrible things and we have little to no way to stop them because the majority of us are weak and passive. We do what we're told and applaud that we were told to do it.
I wonder what the long-term consequences are of western forums being flooded with people advocating CCP talking points whilst all counter-CCP arguments are blocked within China for everyone.
Interesting that the virus the rest of us contracted subsequently had the property that 80% of those infected didn't know they had it. But that wasn't true for the first few cases?
Somewhere, the gods of propaganda and susceptibility are chortling with delight at how easily even ostensibly smart people can believe things based on very limited data.
Being able to tie it specifically to the lab this concretely, by identifying the first patients by name, and having that (allegedly) from US government officials, is all new information, AFAIK.
Yes, this would seem to be a bit of a game-changer on the question. Too bad this appears it’s going to be buried within the HN algo and likely won’t be reported upon seriously in MSM either..
> The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.
You’re very giddy to try to brush this under the rug. The truth is that big tech and Fauci colluded to suppress the lab leak theory, there are leaked emails that prove it. YouTube and Twitter were censoring and demonetizing channels that would talk about the lab leak theory. What do you have to say about that?
Wasn’t the comment just a validation that this story has been out there previously? (not to this extent with the names and a lot more info/context, but thats indeed what I was trying to get clarification on). How does clarifying a news item lead to some bias or stance on the matter, or trying to “brush under the rug?” I think you have read into that comment way too much..
I think that despite the efforts of any of those people, I never stop hearing about these "bombshells" which are trivially disproven. There has been no new evidence or anything of lab leaks since early 2020 and I am just tired of hearing the same things over and over.
ooh, this goes against hacker news hivemind about virus origins being of a natural causes, watch their mental gymnastics as they try to burry everything that contradicts their idea.
Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false information, and harming others by spreading it. From the article:
The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.
in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick.
for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is truthful here, i hope you can help.
edit: i'm even more genuinely interested now because i was initially rapidly downvoted, but all i'm seeing in that interview is the tv host interrupting matt every time he tries to answer a question, this is so weird to me.
Mehdi Hasan is proof that MSNBC can air someone who's as much of a shouty partisanship-addled blowhard as Fox's Sean Hannity.
Investigative journalist Lee Fang goes deeper into Hasan's allegations about Taibbi – plus Hasan's history of plagiarism & viewpoint-flexible controversialism-for-pay at:
Anyone who has seen the interview knows Mehdi wiped the floor with Taibbi and pointed out humiliating mistakes in his reporting -- even Taibbi accepted that.
As for the plagiarism, the article in question is from over 20 years ago, hardly a slam dunk nor is it a representative of his journalistic career. The only reason Fang wrote that is because Mehdi accused him of Islamophobia, it's just petty and desperate nonsense.
I did watch it. Mehdi Hassan found two errors in the entire body of work: One acronym (Taibbi wrote CIS when it was supposed to be CISA), and one date that he got wrong.
Then he hammered Taibbi for an hour on those two errors, as if he were a career fraudster, instead of a lion of journalism.
Mehdi Hasan is a fraud, an establishment actor on a failing corporate propaganda news network no one takes seriously. A tool of his billionaire owners and of the Biden neocons.
So, Hasan was a plagiarist as he fluffed powers-that-be for partisan credibility – including an example Fang cites from Hasan's 2012 book).
The other Fang allegations – including that Hasan now condemns & slurs people for the same sorts of socially-conservative views Hasan once espoused (& maybe still holds in his heart?) also seem well-sourced.
Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity have also "wiped the floor" against remote guests, on their shouty home-field cable TV shows. It's a medium for idiocy: slick & shameless verbal bullies win there, and anyone who adopts their news/views from such interactions remains stuck in a partisanship-addled haze.
> there is a chance that the NSA did intercept Carlson’s attempts to secure an interview with Vladimir Putin
they did, this isn't insane to believe either, they did this to jeff bezos too. US intelligence excels at signal intelligence, this isn't a conspiracy. it then goes on to make even less sense:
> Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency
duh, but obviously putin is, why are they deflecting? this is low quality reasoning that fails to address any meat of the arguments.
plus, what does any of this have to do with matt? and covid? its like every time i ask a question there's more and more deflections away from the original topic. its so strange.
There was no conspiracy about the sacklers and the opioid epidemic. It was obviously true the first article that was written about it.
On Hunter Biden's laptop, somehow there's terrible evidence but the Republicans in the house are supposed to have the laptop and somehow there's no evidence to share? Why is it the Republicans keep having all this great evidence that they can never share with us? Also see the MyPillow guy and his election stealing evidence. Most recently the Republicans said we've lost the guy that was going to give us all the great evidence. Somehow. We won't share his name with you but we can't find him.
Another example is Hillary Clinton and Benghazi. That was a horrible tragedy, but they've had 10 investigations of it and spent millions and millions of dollars and they never came up with anything more than we hate Hillary Clinton and she's terrible. Sometimes these conspiracy theories have real information behind them, but much more commonly they're just created to demonize someone. I'm certainly willing to consider that Biden or his son could have done something bad, but where's the evidence?
What specifically is the actual conspiracy around "Hunter Bidens laptop"?
I am not trying to be dense. I just don't understand I think where the conspiracy is.
> How many former spooks signed a letter claiming it had all the hallmarks of a russian information operation to influence an election? 50?
This was then promoted to "russian disinformation" and treated as fact far and wide across the media.
The Hunter Biden laptop did reek of a Russian operation. It was clearly an attempt to hurt Biden in the 11th hour.
Even if the content is genuine, which everything I've seen appears to be, the story behind it is clearly fabricated in an attempt to launder hacked/stolen data. Unless you believe that Rudy Guiliani is a paragon of honesty.
Anyways, I think it's wrong that the White House attempted to discredit and aggressively remove the content under false pretenses.
At the same time, I think it's important to recognize that the content can be real AND a foreign intelligence campaign at the same time. Russia tried to interfere with the 2017 French election by dumping hacked information[0]; in my opinion, they learned from that failure and realized they needed to launder future leaks so they werent transparently hostile foreign interference. Enter the Hunter Biden laptop.
But 1) Russian had nothing to do with Hunter's laptop and his Jared-Kushner-Roger-Stone level sleaze. A level of sleaze we consider normal because "But them! They do it! They're worse and they hate us." Repubs and Dems both say it about the other and excuse their own. All of it is utterly revolting outside of partisan divides and has led to ever increasing levels of contempt for government and the media covering it. That's a big problem. Bigger?
2) There was no alfa bank server. That one is astonishing that it wasn't a joke from the first 5 seconds of being tried on and tried on it really was. The source of it is interesting, have a look.
3) There were no russian bounties in Afghanistan. Undermining an elected president pursuing a policy with popular support with a lie. And it worked until Biden picked up that policy and took it forward to completion. Wow. Jaw meet floor.
4) The Steele dossier and every story (and everything, including warrants based on it), is a total joke.
So there's 4 occasions where our (entirely valid?) fears were used against us such that our /right/ to forming our own opinion was taken away. And we need to be honest that our revulsion of Trump was also an influence. That same thing tried on Biden would not have passed the sniff test as these should not have. Do we trust democracy or just end it now? I'm going with the former - even when I don't like who gets elected.
Russia couldn't have done that more effectively. Russia has been used as an excuse and a motivation and method to do that. Our fears have been used as a tool. Doesn't make Putin a good guy and neither was Saddam. WMD being a lie didn't make Saddam a better guy either. Same playbook, no?
Do you think Sanders was supported by Russia as was claimed? He had a huge popular support. Maybe he was? Evidence?
I was surprised to learn the FBI never examined the DNC email servers claimed to be hacked by Russia and the contents published by wikileaks. The source has the credibility affected the Alfa bank made-up-story. Maybe it was Russia? Evidence is not what I thought it was. You?
Which is worse for democracy. Russian interference? Or Interference using the fear of it? The second should not be a thing.
The statement that “there are objects that appear to be flying that we sometimes fail to immediately identify” is not something that most people would allege is a conspiracy theory.
The statement that “those UFOs are populated by aliens and the government knows this!” is a conspiracy theory, and has little evidence.
The moniker “conspiracy theory” seems somewhat limited on the whole. I can’t think of a better name right now, maybe “public theory” vs “academic theory” ?
There is nothing wrong with theorizing either, but conspiracy theories often start with the conclusion, and then try to find what facts can fit that narrative. That’s how you can discern more critical theories from just made up stuff or disjointed data points to fit the narrative.
It's more peculiar that I've seen more and more folks make this claim, even though it seems not to be true at all. The person responding to you is using RFK Jr as proof? Yikes.
I’d argue that when he was muckraking against Goldman Sachs and the “Great Vampire Squid” of investment banking, he was already at least bordering on “pat conspiracy” territory.
People noticed less because he was muckraking for the “right side”.
When people with influence confidently label and laugh at conspiracy theories, and one or more turn out to be true, it becomes easier for some to trust the people who find conspiracies everywhere.
One can, but in practice it seems like more people just won't believe the "official story" anymore. That's the behavior that I've seen manifesting lately.
Well that's kinda my point: trusting the official story is known to be not rational behavior, where rational ~= "aspiring to have a maximally accurate / minimally inaccurate model of reality.
It's only one claim in a large body of independent evidence pointing to bat coronavirus research at WIV being the source of the pandemic. Additionally, the collaboration between US-based coronavirus researchers and the Wuhan group dates back to 2013. The fact that the virus appeared pre-adapted to replicate rapidly in humans also is not aligned with previous zoonotic origins, where an adaptation process could be tracked over time as the genetic sequence evolved. Furthermore, the Ecohealth Alliance grant proposals to DARPA etc. for work to be done at WIV involved direct modification of the spike protein sequence, which in Sars-CoV2 has a codon usage pattern optimal for human cells. The question of whether WIV had the original bat coronavirus sequence that was modified into Sars-CoV2 is opaque due to WIV's deletion of their online database of sequences and further refusal to cooperate with investigations.
Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in southern China, then applied various research procedures such as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human researchers and the people around them (including a superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.
Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to which human populations have little innate immunity.
Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
Go read the damn twitter files. That is the source.
Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
> Are you looking for cnn, msnbc, fox, or one of the other media corporations fueled by pharma alone to write an editorial telling you why something is true?
I am looking for specific evidence that substantiates the claim that was made. "Go read the damn Twitter files" is not evidence anymore than "Google it".
> Are you questioning the veracity of the data given in the twitter files? Because even the executive branch didn’t do that.
This means nothing to me, because you have not provided any supporting evidence for your claims.
The Twitter files were a conspiracist field day. Very easy for people to take random quotes or figures out of context and use them to support their preconceived notions. It's amazing how many people are handwaving "look in the Twitter files" as proof of their claim that has no evidence otherwise, or has even been long since disproven. It's not surprising at all to see the same polemicists and grifters tout the same line every time something happens that can be spun to "prove" their point.
Not to say that this is wrong, but it is a biased source. Statements like, "This whole pandemic could have been reshaped" have no content. It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function. It doesn't address why the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market cluster exists at all. It is based on rehashing public information and anonymous sources. All signs point to misinformation.
All you need for a market cluster is one infected person to visit once, & pass the infection along to one or more people who then also spend time there and pass it on. There's no challenging "why" needed.
Yes, but the coincidence of 3 gain-of-function researchers being the very 1st simultaneous infectees would be far more remarkable than a crowded place being the 1st spot that's noticed as a cluster.
No matter the origin of a new highly-nfectious respiratory disease, certain dense public places will quickly turn up as locations-of-spread.
But 3 researchers with likely larger-than-average scrupulosity about infection risks, working on increasing the virulence of bat viruses? Pretty sus!
> It misleading presents that the furin cleavage site had to come from gain of function
it did. this isn't debatable anymore. there's literally grants written by american scientists proposing this pre-covid, the lab in wuhan was doing the legwork.
They are also already present in wild coronoviruses and the initial cluster don't support a lab leak theory, even if they were sloppily working on gain of function via that mechanism.
"Harrison and Sachs’s (1) claim that alignment of sarbecovirus Spike amino acid sequences illustrates“the unusual nature of the [SARS-CoV-2] FCS” is misleading. FCSs are common in coronaviruses, and present in representatives of four out of five betacoronavirus subgenuses (8). The highly variable nature of the S1/S2 junction is easily ascertained by inspecting a precise alignment of sarbecovirus Spikes (Fig. 1C)."
"As more bat CoVs are sampled, it is possible that another SARSr-CoV will be discovered with an S1/S2 FCS insertion. FCSs have evolved naturally in other non-sarbecovirus families of betacoronaviruses (Wu and Zhao 2020). Therefore, an S1/S2 FCS emerging in a sarbecovirus is consistent with natural evolution. Even so, the knowledge that scientists had a workflow for identifying novel cleavage sites in diverse SARSr-CoVs and experimentally characterizing these cleavage sites in SARSr-CoVs—likely in a manner that makes the resulting recombinant SARSr-CoV practically indistinguishable from a rare SARSr-CoV with a naturally emerging FCS—makes it challenging to rule out an artificial origin of the SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 FCS"
It's saying they can arise naturally and it's hard to distinguish origin. Your claim is debatable on its own, and sar-covid-19 GoF resource origin is extremely debatable, even unlikely. At any rate, this article doesn't appear to add anything new to the discussion beyond mixing some anonymous sources with existing public information in a sensationalized way.
edit: let me add, I don't want you downvoted. It may be that this it came from gain of function research at WIV and that the Huanan market cluster was a result of this research. But as of right now, there are other better explanations. I await the Directorate of National Intelligence declassified information this article claims is coming. I do not see how this would have changed the global response to the pandemic.
edit 2: I can't reply to you, stainablesteel. HN thinks I'm posting too much. I am done after this, maybe they are right. I would reply to you with this, though:
---
The furin cleavage site did not have to come from gain of function research. My "wall of text" explains that pretty clearly, even for a layman. That claim is what I said was debatable.
Whether or not it came from GoF research remains to be seen. This article didn't expose any new information, with the possible exception of the names of the WIV researchers.
I have a question for you: what do you think would change the lab origin theory were proven? What should have everyone have done differently during the pandemic? What should we do differently now? I genuinely want to understand your opinion.
there is literally a grant written by an american scientist who sent money for that exact research to that exact lab. a literal paper trail as a grant, and a paper trail in funds.
Sure its evolutionarily possible to insert 12nt. Inserts are not common though. Whats key is that the insert -in a 30kbp sequence was at exactly a position that would give it functional properties to allow the virus much higher tropism for human tissues. Furin cleavage site appear to selected against in bats.
There is no known source from where it came from, coronaviruses often recombine, but there is no other known sarbecovirus from where the fcs could have come from.
Bob Garry tries to explain away his documented "I cant think of a plausible natural scenario for how this 12nt insert occurred" in an interview here.
What is often totally ignored by virologists and evolutionary biologists with potential funding to loose if a kab origin is proven is that the WIV was partner in a proposal to insert exactly the sort of furin cleavage site we see in SARS-CoV-2
Then like magic (a unicorn as Bob Garry says) a SARS-related CoV appears, appears down the road from the lab, that is highly infectious to humans, with the first ever furin cleavage site in a sarbecovirus, which even Zhengli Shi says was a recent inroduction to humans: "almost identical sequences of this virus in different patients imply a probably recent introduction in humans"
Lab escape through a lab acquired infection with a SARS related virus is by far the most likely scenario and should be the default hypothesis to disprove.
Natural origin scenario requires a series of events to occur, each very unlikely.
"Ad hominem" is a great defense used frequently people with bad reputations for serially lying and misleading. If someone is a repeat offender of passing along misinformation, what they claim should be discounted regardless of whether one likes the claims or not. The people associated with this story have shit reputations and the article rests on anonymous sources. It may not be wrong, but someone would have to be a fool to ignore the credibility and reputation of their sources.
Taibbi, Shellenberger, Greenwald — these are not people with “shit reputations.” These are serious and credible journalists with views outside the mainstream. You may not like them, but I strongly dispute their reputations merit serial dismissal of their views. This is precisely what’s wrong with the current discourse on the left.
Thank you for saving me some clicks to figure out who this guy is. I was a bit skeptical about how sensationalized the article is relative to the substantive content of his sources
Taibbi was the first journalist to report on twitter files. Absolutely mindblowing what was going on behind the scenes of Twitter, had heard rumors of FBI pushing narratives but no one really had any idea how bad it was.
This is a nice sentiment but it just doesn’t hold up in the real world.
I’m making this statement generally as opposed to about Matt Taibbi: I don’t really follow him so I’m not evaluating him personally, just your statement in general.
I have a finite amount of time. I don’t have time to “play the ball” given how many balls are out there. Particularly if the player has proven to be a low signal-to-noise ratio source in the past.
I even do this with colleagues as well as media sources. I give people the benefit of the doubt in the beginning, but if you’ve got a track record of not having useful information for me, then I will disregard what you have to say. I’m not going to be mean about it. I might even try to give a heads up about why I think you’re not correct.
But I value my time and eventually it’s just not worth the expenditure.
So no, I’m not going to play the ball: I’ll play the player if their track record is poor. Am I going to miss out on occasion? Sure. But I just don’t have infinite time so I use heuristics and accept imperfection.
There’s another dimension of this discussion about sphere of awareness versus sphere of influence and the utility (or lack thereof) when the former is much larger than the latter. But I will sum my position up by saying that I mostly try to align them.
Removed at the behest of powerful government groups and advertising agencies/pharma companies.
Listen to The Zuck on lex fridman admitting (paraphrasing) “yeah we got some stuff wrong, censored things we shouldn’t have when they later turned out to be evidence based.”
I believe this ,”very very minor”, admission of major guilt is in the first half.
Or the Twitter files and FBI offices in social media etc. or the Wikipedia bias and astroturfing.
I don't know who the other two are, but I sure as hell don't believe a word Matt Taibbi writes after his farcical lack of fact checking in "the twitter files".
This is the sort of thing that should bankrupt a country, and they should be required to make up for the damage their negligence inflicted on the world population.
> Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus.
> It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the public.
At absolutely no point in this article are any new "sources" pointed out.
The authors make that statement early on so as to make the reader think something new in the article is going to be revealed.
Instead we get multiple paragraphs of links to various quotes and suppositions from various people, some of whom were involved in investigating the origins and some who work in the field.