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US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

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Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#171

Post by renewiltord »

elif wrote: post #132
garrettgrimsley wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“commonly known as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party

being "commonly used" is not the same thing as being the "correct uncharged verbiage." For an example, there are many similarly charged terms "commonly used" to identify geographic areas surrounding Israel, but in modern discourse we use "Occupied Palestinian Territory" since 1999.

Yeah, "correct uncharged verbiage" is not the same as "the name that someone wants themselves called". So, I'm not going to call North Korea "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" because despite their preference for being called Democratic, they are not.

North Korea remains North Korea. CCP remains CCP. Blackwater remains Blackwater, not Akademi or Xe or whatever bloody thing they're called now. I'm not going to just go along with whatever rebranding their PR agency told them to do.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#172

Post by graeme »

rossdavidh wrote: post #164
katbyte wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was leaked in oct that’s far earlier then it making it out into general knowledge in Ja. But granted that doesn’t mean the world would have acted, still took most of it till like March to do anything about it lol

serious vaccine work, as I understand it, began in Jan. If it had started in October 2019, things would be very different right now.

Not necessarily. The vaccine design work took all of a day, at least for the mrna vaccines.

You could have frontloaded manufacturing by commissioning companies to produce doses while waiting for trials. But we didn’t do that with the knowledge we had, so unclear earlier knowledge would have worked.

Trials were the big bottleneck and for that you need infected patients. So I guess if they had got a vaccine to wuhan for trials it would have sped things up, but not clear it could have been used in trials there before this all seemed serious.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#173

Post by OminousWeapons »

kergonath wrote: post #84
renewiltord wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone wants the WHO to be powerful . They want the WHO to be honest . And they aren't. But that isn't the WHO's fault or anyone working there. It's a property of what the WHO is.

> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China. If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.

> They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies.

Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.

It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#174

Post by hartator »

elif wrote: post #140
alisonatwork wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this a really fascinating instance of micro-propaganda. CCP could evoke associations with "CCCP", but CPC might remind Americans of the Congressional Progressive Caucus or Canadians of the Conservative Party of Canada. It could be that neither acronym is especially neutral, not after surfacing the accusation that using one is implicitly biased. I have to admit to having used both acronyms in the past, but it w…

It is not "my choice" of a three letter acronym. It is the party's choice for its English language representation. I'm not making any political statements here. I am suggesting that we use common nomenclature while pointing out a hazard of a specific instance of dated terminology.

> It is the party's choice for its English language representation.

Maybe OP disagrees on the party authority to define language including naming itself.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#175

Post by edgyquant »

mc32 wrote: post #161
sa-mao wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked Turkey is still democracy. A better example would be Egypt or KSA or UAE.

They’re a democracy in the same way Russia is a democracy.

Hmm I don’t think so. They’re autocratic for sure but Turkey has been an autocratic democracy for a hundred years so there is a culture of republicanism. I get what you mean but Russia is so new to the voting thing that the comparison isn’t apt imo.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#176

Post by Dylan16807 »

highstep wrote: post #170
btilly wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. A random virus, no. This one, we do. We can't build a virus from scratch. But we can combine pieces of different viruses to build a new one. The same thing also happens naturally when an animal is sick with 2 viruses at once. If both get into the same cell, you get various mixes created and sometimes a mixture will turn out to b…

You really should cite those paper if you're going to offer such significant information. your comment is worthless otherwise.

> You really should cite those paper if you're going to offer such significant information.

Yes.

> your comment is worthless otherwise.

No.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#177

Post by Aunche »

the8472 wrote: post #102
kergonath wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mask early, serious lockdown as soon as it becomes serious, and don’t end lockdowns before numbers are way low. We masked late, put lockdowns in place late if at all, and ended them way too early, which means that some countries went through several ones. And we’re not through yet. That said, I don’t share the optimism of the parent poster. This would be a heavy burden in terms of freedom and human rights for a resul…

>> If the Western world would have done what the WHO advised at the time, we all more or less would have a COVID stuation like the Chinese have for some time. > Mask early Are we living in the same timeline? https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/UNGeneva/status/1244661916535930886 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234095938555260929 https://twitter.com/WHO/status/1234871709091667969 htt…

Most of those tweets were discouraging the use of masks for the purpose of protecting yourself from Covid. This still holds true today. At the time, a lot of people were hoarding masks, thinking it would protect themselves. Letting them continue wouldn't help control the spread, and probably would have increased the spread in hospitals.

I agree the fourth tweet has aged particularly terribly.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#178

Post by xxpor »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #173
kergonath wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want the WHO to be honest. And they aren't They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China. If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.

> They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) earl…

Maybe the US shouldn't have abandoned our leadership position then. Ofc China would fill that vacuum given the opportunity.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#179

Post by elif »

willis936 wrote: post #130
elif wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So calling things by their preferred name is not neutral? This is like making a statement about the demonrats and expecting to be taken seriously. It has the intellectual power of intentionally misgendering someone as a means of insulting them. There is a reason that neoconservatives like Mike Pompeo are revitalizing your preferred acronym.

The fundamental reason that names are considered important right now is because they are tied to expressed identity. Has the CCP’s expressed identity changed? Recall when BP changed their logo last: months after a horrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The singular reason why BP changed their logo was an attempt to trick the public. It wasn’t a changing of identity. Changing the CCP’s name when they haven’t even d…

I am not debating how the governance of china has changed since 1990. There are plenty of cases to be made there, but not mine. I am making a linguistic position.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#180

Post by ern »

mancerayder wrote: post #169
getpolarized wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we / did we even have the tech co be able to build this in a lab? I don't think we do. It MIGHT have been possible but Occam's Razor says it's more plausible it evolved naturally and just jumped species. FAR FAR FAR more plausible.

Why does it have to be "built"? It could have been isolated from bats and studied, and an error / human mistake occurred and it got out. There's a rational reason to study this one, since SARS (1.0) was a big deal in the early 2000's, and anyway why wouldn't you study something you don't fully understand as a matter of course. It's not a stretch if it was found that it leaked from the lab by accident and a cover-up e…

The problem is that an accidental release from a lab has been deliberately conflated with the idea of a bioweapon and labeled a conspiracy theory. Coupled with aggressive propaganda efforts from China, and the fact that the Trump Administration pushed the theory of a lab release (turning the concept into political kryptonite for more than 50% of the US population) its discussion has become verboten.
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